Quesadillas

One of my earliest memories is of a quesadilla. I am in the steep sloping back yard of our house in Guatemala. I am playing near a swing and eating a warm corn tortilla filled with cream cheese. That’s all. Nothing happens. I eat the quesadilla.

Another memory from that time: the tortilla lady, who I remember as enormous, but who probably wasn’t, comes to the house with a huge basket of freshly made corn tortillas on her head. The basket comes down. A transaction. My mom gives me one right away, and I eat it, plain, warm and wonderful.

Fast-forward about 37 years…

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Every other month I get my Fine Cooking magazine in the mail. It resembles my real cooking life about as much as the models in Vogue resemble me, and I adore it.

In my real cooking life I have an outside-the-home job and a toddler, and I make a lot of quesadillas, which I love eating while reading about how to cook a crown roast of pork with Asian ginger glaze or how to braise a pear in marsala, honey and fresh thyme. It brings together my two favorite things, reading and eating, in the closest possible way.

Another advantage to reading about food: it’s highly interruptible. You’re not going to miss some crucial plot turn if you’re reading about how to get the lumps out of gravy. And let's face it, I only get to read for a few minutes at a time before HE needs or wants something. So I make and eat easy food and read about hard food, and it all works out pretty well.

Enzo loves to help in the kitchen, but he has no sense of moderation.
You give him something to stir, and he stirs it onto the counter and
floor and himself, all with great joy. So the trick is to give him
something to do that doesn't involve liquids or sharp knives, and then
cook dinner really fast while he's occupied with his own project.

So I'll give him a butter knife and a cooked whole sweet potato, and he
cuts it up. 'Cuts' is a generous description. 'Hacks' might be more
accurate. There's also a lot of mashing. Sometimes we eat the results.
Sometimes I secretly throw them away.

Meanwhile I'm cooking whatever we're actually going to eat, usually
quesadillas. Cheddar, flour tortillas and butter pretty much do it
for us. But you can branch out: mozzarella, store-bought pesto and a touch of tomato paste = instant pizza. Goat cheese, leftover caramelized onions and halved cherry tomatoes are good in the summer. (I make caramelized onions in the slow cooker, which is the only way you can possibly do it in my circumstances.) Feta, some other meltier cheese, and chopped kalmata olives make a sort of Greek quesadilla, especially if you dip it in yogurt-lemon-garlic-mayo-dill sauce. And of course you can put cooked chicken with pretty much any cheese, and it works.

A few months ago, or maybe years, Fine Cooking actually had an article on quesadillas. The premise of the article was, anything with melted cheese in a tortilla counts, so use your imagination. There was a recipe for four-cheese quesadillas fried in garlic butter and for fontina and mushroom quesadillas fried in parmesan butter. Of course it feels good to have what you’re already doing described officially in a magazine. You feel less a slut when your endless quesadillas get this kind of dignified treatment. You also feel like they stole your ideas, but of course there is no originality in cooking. All recipes are just variations and reminders of good things to eat. (I just looked up the issue, July of 2006, which predates my own quesadilla jag. This means I have been stealing from them, not the other way around.)

Anyway, Enzo and I both really like quesadillas. It’s one of the few things we agree on. When I’m cooking, I sometimes pause for a moment and watch him hacking at his sweet potato with such pure concentration, and I wonder if his first memory will be a food memory. It seems likely. I hope it’s a good one.