Best 13 quotes of Jessica Soffer on MyQuotes

And that's what love is, I suppose. The one thing that is most worth hoping for, and the one thing that's most surprising when it lands. Because it's better. It exceeds hope, makes hope nearsighted.

I had a lump in my throat the size of a bundt cake pan.

I raced around getting ingredients on the recipe Victoria had given me. I started making the dough for the Iraqi pita, which Violet on YouTube said would need two hours to rise. I used whole-wheat flour, though I'd never seen my mother touch anything but all-purpose or cake; I wasn't taking any chances. I'd do it right. I went to three different bodegas before I finally found mangoes for pickling. They were small and hard as rocks, but I'd try leaving them in a paper bag with a dozen apples to hurry up the ripening. If that didn't work, I'd read something about microwaving them until they were soft, but I was a little worried about ending up with mango mousse. I bought Meyer lemons, thinking the sweetness could be nice, but as soon as I got home, I thought of my mother, her mouth shrinking into a knot: You used Meyer lemons? Like she'd never understand why I did the things I did. I went back out, got snowed on again, bought real lemons on the corner, and then went home and pickled them with ginger, paprika, garlic, and salt. I hoped they'd taste like they'd been marinating for months but I was starting to have a bad feeling. Things weren't exactly working out. I cut myself twice, accidentally, trying to use the mandoline to slice the onions "as thin as a breath." I made a bed of them that looked like a lattice. I sprinkled thyme on top. The whole thing looked like the side of a house in Scotland where roses grew like weeds. I hoped my mother liked Scotland, but I'd never asked her. I minced garlic until my hand was shaking.

I told her one of the few stories that she'd told me of myself as a child. We'd gone to a park by a lake. I was no older than two. Me, my father, and my mother. There was an enormous tree with branches so long and droopy that my father moved the picnic table from underneath it. He was always afraid of me getting crushed. My mother believed that kids had stronger bones than grownups. "There's more calcium in her forearm than in an entire dairy farm," she liked to say. That day, my mother had made roasted tomato and goat cheese sandwiches with salmon she'd smoked herself, and I ate, she said, double my weight of it. She was complimenting me when she said that. I always wondered if eating so much was my best way of complimenting her. The story went that all through lunch I kept pointing at a gaping hole in the tree, reaching for it, waving at it. My parents thought it was just that: a hole, one that had been filled with fall leaves, stiff and brown, by some kind of ferrety animal. But I wasn't satisfied with that explanation. I wouldn't give up. "What?" my father kept asking me. "What do you see?" I ate my sandwiches, drank my sparkling hibiscus drink, and refused to take my eyes off the hole. "It was as if you were flirting with it," my mother said, "the way you smiled and all." Finally, I squealed, "Butter fire!" Some honey upside-down cake went flying from my mouth. "Butter fire?" they asked me. "Butter fire?" "Butter fire!" I yelled, pointing, reaching, waving. They couldn't understand. There was nothing interesting about the leaves in the tree. They wondered if I'd seen a squirrel. "Chipmunk?" they asked. "Owl?" I shook my head fiercely. No. No. No. "Butter fire!" I screamed so loudly that I sent hundreds of the tightly packed monarchs that my parents had mistaken for leaves exploding in the air in an eruption of lava-colored flames. They went soaring wildly, first in a vibrating clump and then as tiny careening postage stamps, floating through the sky. They were proud of me that day, my parents. My father for my recognition of an animal so delicate and precious, and my mother because I'd used a food word, regardless of what I'd actually meant.

My mother said my father walked out that time, the final time, because she had spent eight hundred dollars at the French Hen in Manchester- she'd special-ordered lox and toro and paddlefish caviar- and he wanted her to be miserable.

Seconds later, a girl emerged from the stairwell, her feet barely tapping the floor. I stepped back, shocked. She wasn't a fifty-year-old lady. She wasn't my daughter. She wasn't Robert either. She was fifteen, if that. Her cheeks were the color of brick. I opened the door. She was wearing a rain jacket, and her hands were hidden in her sleeves. "Sorry," she said. "The subway was so slow. I got out at Ninety-Sixth Street and walked." Her voice was deeper than I would have thought. She took off a hat that looked too big for her, all flaps and flannel. She was long-necked, reddish-haired, and freckled, but olive in the skin, as if she'd been shaded. Her eyes were light blue, like ancient sea glass. She took off her sneakers without using her hands and then leaned over and placed them neatly by the door. They were flat as pancakes, with shoelaces that didn't match. She was wearing socks with white bugs on them. She curled her toes when she saw me looking. "You know they eat them in Thailand?" she said. "Oven-baked with green curry." "Socks?" I asked. "No," she said and the sides of her cheeks lifted into a smile. "Crickets on my socks.

She hadn't had a bite of her dinner. I'd even curled the pasta into a little linguine nest in the center of each bowl. My mother's was still perfect and round and cold. The sauce had darkened. "This is delish," she said. "But it needs red wine. I tell you because I love you and you should know for the future." She went on about deglazing and how it brings out the earthy taste of the onions and never use wine you wouldn't drink yourself and a young, robust wine is what you use in red sauces, nothing fortified or dry, for example.

There was one thing that made my mother truly happy: food. In New Hampshire, to save money, she turned off the heat and kept on the oven while she made four varieties of roasted beet soup. She wore pomegranate perfume. At the supermarket, she was like an ant building a hill. At night, she slept with yogurt and honey smeared on her face. Food was my mother's life. Sometimes, I wondered if she'd married my father because of his last name: Seltzer. Her maiden name wasn't really her own. She was adopted. So she took a last name that represented the only part of herself that felt true: food. And seltzer was her secret to delicate crepes, the perfect French onion tart, and fried chicken that actually glittered.

Those are juice glasses," she said. I smiled. "Right," I said. "This is how we drank it in Baghdad." I put down the steaming glass in front of her and wrapped the oven mitt around the bowl of bamia and brought that too, smelling it on the way. "Heaven," I said. I watched her as she ate until I caught myself. "I haven't made this in years," I said. Lorca lifted her shoulders, cocked her head, asking why. "I don't know," I said. "I should have. There's a saying in Arabic: Bukra fil mish mish. 'Tomorrow, when the apricots bloom.' Or, in other words, maybe tomorrow. I kept thinking that. I'd do it tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow." I was thinking of Lorca, of cooking again. But I thought of Joseph too. No more tomorrows with him.

We'd had two blizzards and it was only December and my mother said if it snowed one more time she would skewer herself on a butterfly knife. That's when it occurred to me that we could move to California, and for about ten seconds, I felt like a genius. We could have avocado trees and Honeybell orange juice every morning. We could drive up the coast on weekends and be treated like royalty at the French Laundry. She could open a new kind of bistro that married haute French cuisine with New American. Alice Waters would make us brunch at her place and would be blown away by the dessert that my mother baked with four varieties of heirloom plum.

We didn't have wooden stakes in the ground. We didn't have burning brushwood either. We didn't have fish from the Tigris or the Euphrates. We did have fresh red snapper from Citarella, which I butterflied down the back; tamarind paste from Fairway; hand-skimmed olive oil from Tunisia. We had a small fire when Victoria's sleeve brushed past the stove. And when I threw a glass of water at her, we had a fit of laughter so overpowering that I had to help her into a chair.

What is the best thing you've ever eaten?" Poulet rôti. I was sure that my mother was going to say the poulet rôti from L'Ami Louise in Paris because she'd sat next to Jacques Chirac there and he'd said that since she was a chef, perhaps she would cook something for him. And so she did. She went right back into the kitchen and whipped up something fabulous. After that, they used goose as well as duck fat when frying their potatoes, because it had been her way. I mouthed Poulet rôti into the pillow. But my mother was quiet. She could have made conversation, little noises while she was thinking. But she didn't. Lou didn't care. "Masgouf," she said. "From an Iraqi restaurant that's closed now." I sat up. I opened my mouth. I almost yelled, What? But she was still talking. "I went there with her dad years and years ago." I imagined her jerking her thumb in the direction of my room. "The company was like watching paint dry, but the food was fantastic. Out of this world." "And?" Lou said. "And," my mother said, "I went back a couple of years ago, just to see, and it was closed up. Totally empty and sad. One silver tray sat in the middle of the place, I remember. Broke my heart to pieces." "Masgouf?" Lou said. I was already out of bed, sockless and by the bookshelf, ripping through the index of The Joy of Cooking, then Cook Everything, then, finally, Recipes from All Over. I found it. "'Traditional Iraqi fish dish, grilled with tamarind and/or lemon, salt, and pepper,'" I whispered, shocked. "It was heaven," my mother said. "Literally heaven. I've tried to replicate it, I can't tell you how many times." For a second, I saw spots. I would have bet my life on it- on the poulet rôti. "You know how they say that life imitates art?" my mother said. "Well, life imitated masgouf. The fish was so good, so tender, and we ate it with our fingers. For a little while, I convinced myself that life could be so simple." Which meant happiness. Masgouf was my mother's happiness.

Writers are never fully present because they’re always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future in a different way.