November Evenings

This is the time of year my mother would make her wild rice stuffing.

It came from an old and much-loved Market Day cookbook. If you’re not from the Midwest, perhaps you’re unfamiliar with Market Day. It was a branch of the Sodexo food service, they provided our grammar school with hot lunches and monthly (or bi-monthly, I’m not sure) they would hold after-school events in our cafeteria where the offered up coolers full of family style frozen dinners. We were great fans of their Chicken Kiev.

I forget when exactly we got the cookbook from them, perhaps I was in the fourth grade. But I remember my mother and I poring over its pages when they were still glossy and new and not yet dog-eared, that we found this recipe for wild rice stuffing.

It called for boiling the long-grain wild rice in low-sodium chicken broth, a medium yellow onion, a few celery stalks, some cloves of garlic, pecans, and dried cranberries. My mother had the brilliant idea of pairing it with a pork loin recipe we would stuff with fine, thickly cut bacon and onion before marinating that loin in nearly a whole bottle of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce.

We would often pair the pork and wild rice with an acorn squash, roasted in the oven with olive oil and salt and pepper, before finishing it off with a tab of Land O’Lakes butter and served with some brown sugar.

My mother would always insist on a salad or else some sort of vegetable, often times both. I would vote for her Brussels sprouts, boiled until tender with their stems sliced off, before being glazed in butter with rosemary, julienned carrots, and almonds.

Those were the days when we ate well, we feasted like royalty on Sunday nights, until our bellies were full; our glasses were always filled with wine: my mother, a Sauvignon Blanc, golden in the November evening light, my father a claret, dark and luminous as a cherry, and myself a Pinot Noir: midnight rouge as it was.

We would always change into our pajamas and re-convene in our living room, my mother with her yarn and knitting needles beside her, and me in my armchair; we’d decide on a motion picture to watch (frequently it was 2006’s Casino Royale, a family favorite); and we did this all the time without realizing what a sacred act this act of togetherness was.