HAPPY MOTHERS DAY! Here’s a picture of my mother when she was my age. Isn’t her 1970s style amazing? (She rocks the center part and aviators so well.) I love you, Mama! What are you doing with your mom to celebrate?

SO ABOUT A MONTH ago, when I had first gotten home for semester break, I tweeted about a very sisterly moment between my mother and me, in which we gorged ourselves on pistachios and talked about Alec Baldwin’s undying handsomeness. Lo and behold, the Wonderful Pistachio company (twitter.com/@getcrackin) contacted me several days later and said that they chose my tweet as one of their recent favorites about pistachios. And furthermore, that they would like to send me some free nuts! I was a bit skeptical at first.

But sure enough, just around the new year I got an envelope stuffed with coupons for free pistachios. I think the moral of the story here is that it pays to be sisterly. In the meantime, I’ll be nursing my raw fingers back to health before I start chowing down on my next batch of nuts.

THIS IS OUR YEAR FOR A THANKSGIVING with a twist. I’m living in my first apartment that really feels like home (hooray!), so last week my mom packed a bag and drove down the coast to spend the holiday with me. We’re going to be eating an all-vegetarian meal with some dear friends in Charlotte. On the menu is old-fashioned corn pudding, apple crisp, mashed potatoes, sautéed kale, and baked squash with apples. What won’t we be eating, you ask (turkey and ham aside)? Seaweed. Yup, that’s right. Because we already tried that on Thanksgiving.

Two years ago my mom declared that she would be making a Hijiki seaweed salad as her contribution for our extended family’s big Thanksgiving feast. No one argued. But she defended it nonetheless. As a devout health-food eater (and a dreamer at that), she told us all that a seaweed salad was, in fact, a far more traditional choice than a turkey stuffed with bread or sweet potatoes mixed up with sugar and marshmallows because the Early American settlers lived by the sea. And, duh, they ate seaweed.

But the Pilgrims would have used animal fat instead of sesame oil, she assured us later.

This year, the Hijiki will be absent. In part because Mom claims no one ate it the last time (although I do remember some very manly Italian family members shoveling forkfuls of the dish in their mouths between bites of turkey). We’re going a different route for the Thanksgiving 2k9 menu, but perhaps the Hijiki will be back another year, taking its place between the green beans and the cranberry sauce as the only truly black food of the harvest season. It’s a quite delicious recipe. So if you’re looking for the perfect Early American Plymouth Rock Japan fusion this holiday season (or whenever), here’s your ticket:

Mom’s Thanksgiving Hijiki Salad

1 tablespoon sesame oil

2 cups soaked reconstituted Hijiki

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 ½ cups carrots, cut into matchsticks

1 cup corn kernels (fresh or frozen)

several stalk of scallions, chopped

2 tablespoons mirin

tamari to taste

Heat sesame oil over medium head in a large skillet. Sauté onion until tender and translucent. Add carrots, and continue to cook until crispy tender. Stir in Hijiki, corn and mirin together. Cover the seaweed vegetable mixture, stirring occasionally for 8 – 10 minutes. Add tamari and scallions. Stir well and transfer to a salad bowl. Toss with more sesame oil to taste. Serve room temperature.

(photo via Japanese Food Dictionary)

1970s Polaroid of my mother (back) with my grandmother and my aunt.

MY FAMILY’S STORY OF FOOD is partly the story of our evolution, of our identities unraveling into who we are today. As a third-generation American, I can barely pronounce gnocchi, let alone make it. And while that seems almost tragic to me, that’s the way my Italian grandmother and great grandmother would have wanted it—their offspring bearing the regional accents of New England and not of Asti. (My great grandmother, Nanny, actually used to pronounce that pasta dish “gnoch” in an effort to sound less Italian.)

Like her own mother, my grandmother called gnocchi “gnoch” and risotto “risott,” chopping off ending syllables in denial of her linguistic and culinary roots. My mother grew up eating white sauces on pasta, pots of polenta, animal intestines, giblets, and boiled chicken feet (or at least that’s the impression I’ve gotten)—dishes made with a delicate mix of Italian cuisine carry-over, spendthrift, and just the right amount nutritional weirdness supplied by my grandmother. Money was tight, and things were generally not very joyful.

We had never eaten meat until we adventurously branched out as teenagers, nibbling buffalo wings at restaurants or tasting a sliver of turkey on Thanksgiving.

As adults, my parents shed their chicken feet-eating (or in the case of my dad canned Chef Boyardee ravioli-eating, but that’s another story) identities from times they didn’t particularly admire, and became vegetarians. They grew their own food and canned it for winter—rutabaga, corn, squash, peas, beets, and beans. They rarely ate animal products at all. After T and I were born, our parents raised us as vegetarians. We asked for hot cereal mush in the morning and tofu for dinner. We had never eaten meat until we adventurously branched out as teenagers, nibbling buffalo wings at restaurants or tasting a sliver of turkey on Thanksgiving.

So today, as the TSP sisters share the stories behind their favorite auxiliary cookbooks, I’m offering one of my grandmother’s recipes for “Tripe in Sour Gravy” from her 1937 copy of America’s Cook Book. I’m sure anything with “American” in the name truly tickled her fancy. (She was known, after all, to favor Velveeta over “mozzarell” on occasion.)

Tripe is bovine stomach lining. I wouldn’t eat this, nor would I recommend eating this. Don’t worry, T’s and my kinds of recipes—for dishes like cabbage salad, veggie fritters, and crispy tofu—are forthcoming. I actually think enough tripe could turn anyone vegetarian. Take heed. Or maybe give it a try if you’re trying to kick the habit.

S O HERE’S A relic of second-wave feminism straight from my mother’s bedroom wall.

Women united cannot be defeated! Women united cannot be defeated!