Seasoning, as I like it

If there's a heaven, I know my aunt is in it.

No matter how many sins she may have commited, she surely was redeemed by the culinary gifts she possessed and hospitality with which she charmed everyone she knew. She put these talents of her to use cooking breakfasts for the B&B she and my uncle owned in New Orleans many years ago.

I've been thinking about her a lot lately, slowly unraveling and knitting together the various ways she affected my life in the 30 years I knew her. And so tonight, I'm cooking up her jambalaya as the weekly meal I prepare so I can eat leftovers on the nights I have school. She once told me to cook this in times I'm poor, and I'm feeling a bit strapped at this moment, so it seemed a good choice.

It's also a way to connect with her. Each time I make this recipe, which she dictated to me about a year ago on my last visit while she was alive, I am taken back into her kitchen. Actually, two kitchens. The one she had in Hawaii and the one in New Orleans.

I cannot count the times I stood in her kitchen, watching her cook and talking with her. But time and again, when I think of her, many of those memories are fused with the kitchen. Jambalaya, étouffée, sauces and dips, Southern veggies of all sorts, blackened fish, roasts and, the Holy Grail of Liz's Kitchen, her crab meat crepes and café au lait.

My taste buds fall into revery just thinking about her cooking.

I cannot tell you, though, how low my heart sinks when I realize -- over and over again, each time feeling like a fresh revelation -- that I will never again stand in the kitchen with her and talk. My aunt was a wise woman, so much so that I have for the past 20 years or so held the expectation of seeing her grow very old and wondering just how wise she would get with age. This always came to my imagination by way of seeing her with long, grey hair, standing at the stove.

In my imagination, I would be a receptical. I would raise a topic, ask a question and, as she cooked, this wise old woman would tell me what she thought. Never in the form of "an answer." Always in story. As she moved around the kitchen, cooking.

In these moments -- even now I can conjure this and see it -- I felt satisfied, cared for and respected. In many ways, she has been one of the most significant and positive fixtures in my personal iconography.

I gather that's what one would call a mother figure (in the positive sense of the word).

Of course, she was human. But on the whole, in my real life, I felt very much satisfied, cared for and respected in my experience with her. Even when she was sick. Even in the conversation we had just a few hours before she died.

No one in my life has been so caring toward me. So tenacious in their love (even when I was a crazy, neurotic teen-ager constantly at war with my family). So welcoming of me at any and all moments. What's that saying? Home is the place where, when you show up, they have to take you in? That was her home.

I can't call her my mother, because she wasn't. But as I hold her in my heart, that is really what she represents.

I am angry that my imagination of these many years will not come to fruition. I feel cheated there. And yet, I also have this profound sense of gratitude for all the times I did stand in that kitchen, talking with her. I was fortunate enough one day last year to film her telling part of her life story -- while she was cooking.

And I was also blessed, during that same visit, with the dictation of the Jambalaya.

Tonight, when I went to cook it, I looked at the recipe I had written down. Having cooked it before, most recently for a Mardi Gras party, I check over the recipe for ingredients before going to the store. Today, for the first time, I saw a funny little thing in it that I never noticed before, and I laughed when I read it.

She had, one day while we were eating some Jamabalay she cooked before I arrived, simply said, "You want to cook this yourself..." and tossed off the recipe. I wrote it upside down on the back page of my journal, scribbled rather hurridly. In the list of ingredients -- celery, onions, garlic, etc. -- are the following words: "seasoning 'that you want' ".

Today I looked at that: That you *want*? I said aloud. Exactly what is that?

And then I realized two things: In being so vague, Liz had not shared *her* jambalaya. But in exchange, she ensured I would create one of my own, which is at heart what a Jambalaya is all about.

This is something I learned from Liz time and again: Seek counsel, listen to the stories people tell you, but always find your own way.

It is a loss beyond measure to acknowledge I will never again seek counsel from her in the kitchen.

But I believe those 20 years were not wasted in my imagination. She lives on within me. So now, I can simply go into the kitchen and seek counsel from myself.

Well, a quick sample from the pot simmering in my kitchen tells me the Jambalaya is done. Not surprisingly, it has the seasoning that I want.