North Dakota local food

If I am going to get a new cookbook, the best possible situation is to have my dad next to me when I do. I can’t think of a better companion for looking through recipes. Who else but my father reads through lists of ingredients with as much relish as I do, as if they were suspenseful novellas? Who else immediately starts thinking about how to change -- and improve -- recipes that we haven’t even tried yet? Nobody, that’s who.

One of my favorite rules to live by comes from Michael Pollan: Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Pollan’s advice is especially apt for me when I think about my own great-grandmother. Hilda Liljequist was born to immigrant Swedish parents in Boston in 1889. She attended the Boston Cooking School as a teenager, and took her first job as chef at a hotel in New Orleans. A few years later she made her way, by ship through the Panama Canal and by train, to a new job in Oakland, California, where she met and married my great-grandfather, a Scotch-Irish blacksmith from a Michigan farm who had actually run away and joined the circus as a youth. Later they moved to Los Angeles, when it was still possible to drive around the back roads of Hollywood, stopping to gather wild elderberries and pick oranges from a roadside grove.