I Wanna Make It

What do you wish you knew how to make?

Surprisingly, the things I would like to make well are simple things.  How to confidently cook a medium rare steak that isn't tough.  How to cook pork or chicken breasts without them getting too dry.  How to cook meat in the slow cooker that doesn't become a mushy texture.  How to make the kind of post roast my mother used to make.

I can cook a 7 course Chinese feast, but can't do those simple things.

However, I am a baker of many things -- pies, cookies, cakes, etc.  I am good at following recipes and not really afraid to try anything, yet I have never tried pastries.  I would love to know how to make a good croissant, or some of those wonderful fruit- or cheese-filled pastries.  I would love instruction in how to make the dough flaky by rolling it over and over again.

But maybe it's better that I don't know how to do that, all things considered!  Walt is not a pastry eater, so I know who would eat most of whatever it is that I learn how to make.

I have also always wanted to know how to make pasta.  I had my first homemade pasta many years ago at a party, made by our friend John Ziaja.  It was the best pasta ever and I have thought, off and on, of getting a pasta attachment for my KitchenAid mixer.

But the thing that keeps me from doing it is the same thing that keeps me from learning how to make delicious pastries.  I would be the person who eats the most of it and just what I do not need is another excuse to eat calorie-filled foods.

(Of course, if my 7 year old granddaughter Brianna can make pasta, surely it is something I can do!)

3 Prompts in One

The prompts for the next 3 days involve short answers, so since I am not going to be here at the end of October, I'm going to answer these three together and then take the prompts for the end of the month, skipping the questions about gossip which, inexplicably, come in the middle of the food prompts

* What was the first thing you ever learned how to cook?
* Have you ever invented your own recipe? What was your first one?
* What do you consider your most successful dish?

Oh Lord.  The first thing I ever learned to cook?  I don't have a clue, but it was probably chocolate chip cookies.  My mother made them often and I loved them.  Funny thing about chocolate chip cookies, though -- my favorite part is the part without the chips and there is a magic place where that part is just right.  I can't explain the taste, but all I know is that store bought cookies don't have it and 90% of the time the cookies I make don't have it.  But occasionally they do and then I struggle to remember what I did so I can do it next time, but next time they don't have it either.  In my memory, my mother's cookies always had that taste.  Is it light brown for dark brown sugar?  Margarine for butter? Part shortening?  I just can't seem to get it right, though the only person disappointed is me because they taste just fine.

I don't have a dish that is all my own made up stuff.  For that you will have to go to son Tom.  But I rarely make the same dish the same way twice.  I have been known to take a recipe and other than the main ingredient (which was why I chose the dish in the first place), I have changed nearly every other ingredient because we didn't have what the recipe called for.  Red wine for white, oregano for basil, orange for lemon, brown sugar for white, carrots for celery, red potatoes for white.  Whatever.  If the item is in the same category as the ingredient I am missing I'll substitute.  Sometimes the results are better than the original, sometimes it's a big mistake.  (The one ingredient I rarely need to substitute because I always have it is the one ingredient Walt would prefer I leave out entirely:  onions.)  But I figure if 10 year olds on the Food Network cooking contests can talk about "big bold flavors" and create amazing dishes, I can surely experiment.

I don't know that I have "a" most successful dish.  One of Walt's favorites is Mexican Skillet, which came out of a La Leche League cookbook which was published in 1971 (I may even have a recipe or two in it).  Mexican skillet is a favorite and I always use the recipe, though about half the ingredients have been substituted and I always make my own version.

There was a time when I occasionally made burgundy beef balls, from a Good Housekeeping cookbook.  That was another of Walt's favorites.  But I've kind of gotten away from beef in the last several years and don't cook much with it and the last time I made it, it didn't taste as good as I remembered it as tasting.

In the years when I was doing Chinese cooking, I could make a mean multi course Chinese meal, and in the years when we had lots of foreign students living with us, I made a mean feijoada (the national dish of Brasil) and a pretty good empanada (from Chile).  

But these days, I don't cook as much as I used to and I'm learning the joys of having a Trader Joe's in the neighborhood.  Just had their creamed spinach with summer squash au gratin tonight and why would I cook from scratch when that is so delicious?

Evolving Tastes

Happy Indigenous People's Day!

Back to NaBloPoMo.  Today's topic is:  Is your least favourite food from childhood still your least favourite dish?

Well, the prize for least favorite will always go to liver and no, age has not changed my opinion of that vile substance.  As I said in a previous entry, there is not enough bacon or onions on earth that will make that organ palatable.

But my tastes have mellowed over the years.  Used to be I hated mushrooms.  Wouldn't touch anything with mushrooms in it.  Now I love mushrooms and sometimes just sauté mushrooms alone for a side dish for myself.  How could I have hated mushrooms?

I also never liked cauliflower, but when I started adding it to mashed potatoes to help the potatoes go farther and to up the vegetable component on my plate, I discovered I really grew to like them.  I don't cook cauliflower all the time, but will occasionally cook it by itself, not adulterated by potatoes.

Brussels sprouts.  Another dreaded vegetable.  However, this is one food that is improved by the addition of bacon and/or onion.  I have found several recipes for sprouts that I like.

I would never eat shredded wheat and I still don't, but that's because I haven't tried it in my adult years.  I probably wouldn't mind it.

There are a lot of things I have never tried, like a lot of the root vegetables (turnips, parsnips, etc.), at least if I've had them, I don't know that I've had them.  I never did like water chestnuts, and still don't (which is kind of how Walt feels about onions).

I'm basically not very adventurous when it comes to food.  I love watching cooking shows, especially things like Chopped and Top Chef, but I look at the things they sometimes cook and ain't no way I'm going to eat that, especially organ meats.

I also can't bear to watch cooks preparing lobster.  They take this live animal and literally tear it apart limb by limb, or throw it, still squirming into boiling water.  Fortunately I don't like lobster, not even drenched in butter.  I realize they do the same thing to crab and I try not to think about that because I love crab.  Yes, I'm a food hypocrite

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Took my mother's meds to her today and was pleased to note that she seems to have taken her meds daily this week. She sometimes forgets.  

Somehow she has gotten it into her head that Walt and I go dancing.  I don't have a clue why but she asked me several times today if he and I were going to go out dancing tonight.  She and her husband loved to dance and maybe she's putting that on me, since he's not around any more.  But other than dancing at weddings, Walt and I have not danced together in 50 years.

She said she didn't remember the last time she danced and I told her it was at her 90th birthday party.  I pointed out the framed photo she had right by her side of the group at the party.  She picked it up, but didn't recognize many people.  The photo has a wide border that people signed and she could not recognize any of the names except Jeri.  She asked me 3 times who "Eileen Broderick" was and I explained it was her sister's daughter-in-law and reminded her of the wedding we attended at a family reunion one year, but that went way over her head.

I finally left Atria the fifth time she asked if Walt and I were going to go dancing tonight.

Dreaded Foods

The prompt for today is;

What dish did you dread being served as a kid?

I think my mother finally stopped trying to serve me liver, but it took awhile.  Vile, nasty stuff and though people have told me I haven't had it with enough onions or enough bacon, I'm sorry, there is not enough bacon in the world to make it taste better.  It was the one problem I had with the Weight Watchers diet.  We were supposed to eat liver once a week and there just was no way I was going to do that.  How delighted I was some years ago when there was a warning about the danger of eating liver. I felt vindicated!

I also, believe it or not, hated eating raw carrots.  Cooked carrots were OK, but there was something about the texture of raw carrots that my mouth could not handle.  I would chew and chew and chew and look like a cow chewing its cud, but the only way that masticated mess would go down my throat was if I drank a lot of water and forced it down.  I don't have that problem today, however.

My grandmother often tried new things.  I still remember the celery root salad she made which I hated so much that to this day I have not eaten celery root.  And there was a celery and cranberry salad my mother tried one Christmas which, though I enjoy all the ingredients, made me so nauseated that I have not eaten anything similar since.

But basically I was not a picky eater.  Put enough butter on anything (except liver) and I would like it.

My sister, however, was a different story.  She was a very picky eater and the rule was that you could not leave the table until you had finished your dinner.

At that time, my mother had an "ironer" sitting in the kitchen.  See the legs that the machine sits on?  Well, it turns out that those legs are actually hollow.

I don't know how long it was before the day when my mother noticed mashed potatoes around the small hole opening into the hollow part of the ironer legs.  That's when she discovered that Karen had been pushing all her unwanted food down the legs and that was how she earned the right to leave the table.

My sister was definitely creative.

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Today I had coffee with two long-time friends.  Ironically, I had coffee with Jessica  "Moms" Brown almost exactly a year ago, and at that time Kari had stopped by to chat with us.  After much back and forth on who could make it again, on which date, we finally met this morning, and what fun it was.  The usual "organ recital," and discussions of memory problems, our own and our parents', health care in this country and how we feel about our doctors, how to stay young (and the relative nature of "old age"), what our kids are doing, what we've been doing (tho since both Kari and Jess read this journal sometimes, I didn't need to tell them much!) and the plight of society today with regard to spelling, cursive writing, and other things.  Always fun to meet with intelligent women and discuss mutual topics of interest.  (Best of all, the word "Trump" was not uttered.)

Defining Dishes

The prompt for today is;

What are the dishes that defined your childhood? What were your favourite dishes to eat?

Perhaps my most pleasant memories of childhood center around food, which may explain why I look the way I do!  I grew up in a house where dessert was not only offered every night after dinner, but if you were too full, you were berated for not eating all of your dinner.

We had taste tests to determine which was the richest, most fat-full milks, ice creams, etc.  I was put on my first diet at age 10 and while I felt guilty for much of my childhood for being so fat, how does a 10 year old get fat anyway?  It's not like I made my own decisions about what foods to eat, or that I was taught the value of a balanced diet!  I just ate what was served. It wasn't my fault that the cookie jar was always filled with home made cookies, that dinner rolls AND potatoes accompanied dinner, that cereal came with full fat cream poured over it (still a treat today, though I almost never let myself have it), or that Sees chocolates were a staple at every holiday dinner.

My sister and I even had contests to see who could eat the most "hockies."

Hockies definitely define my life.  It was the name my German great grandmother called fried bread dough.  Just hunks of dough, flattened and fried to a golden brown, served hot, lathered with butter.  I think my personal best was ten.  (As a teen ager, my mother once ate 12 corn on the cobs, in the years when she acquired the nickname "Chubby," which followed her the rest of her life!)

English muffins were a special on Sunday morning, the only day of the week we had them.  I got to butter them before they went into the broiler and again, there was a "how many can you eat?" component to that too.  Didn't want to leave any uneaten at the end of the meal.

We had dinner at my fraternal grandparents' several times a year and dinner always came with Cheetos and Sunset Magazine hors d'oeuvres, which were thin slices of baguette spread with a mixture of mayonnaise, parmesan cheese and thinly sliced green onions and then broiled.  Still love them today (and still buy Cheetos today, come to think of it).

My maternal grandparents lived in Inverness (California) when it was much less developed than now.  We didn't see them often because it was a long drive and I always got sick on the winding roads (nothing is more fun than throwing up while your father yells at you for throwing up, as if you could control it!)  They had a cabin on an acre of land and one field had a wall of blackberry bushes.  I loved going out with my cousin to pick blackberries.  Then I would bring them in the back door of the house, where my grandmother kept her package of Lorna Doone shortbread cookies and I loved squishing a ripe blackberry between two Lorna Doones.  My own mini version of a strawberry shortcake (which I also loved, with home made biscuits and mounds of real whipped cream)

When we returned from a trip to visit my grandparents, it would generally be too late to cook dinner, so my mother served us "milk toast," toast thickly buttered, in a bowl, with warm milk poured over it.

I remember when my mother discovered pesto, and "pasta with pesto" was always a big treat when she made it (still is today--Walt loves it).

And then there were "Goodness Sake Cookies."  My mother went to a luncheon once where they were served and she got the recipe.  It was years later before I realized these were actually Mexican Wedding Cakes, balls of short dough with pecans, baked and then rolled in powdered sugar.  We had them every Christmas.

There were so many foods that defined my childhood.  As I said, I was put on my first diet at age 10, for good reason!

Who DID the Cooking?

The prompt for today is;

Who did most of the cooking in your house when you were growing up?

My mother, definitely.  Until I was in high school, she was a stay at home mom and even after she got a job with the Bank of America, it was only a couple of days a week, to start, so she was home the rest of the time.  She not only cooked dinner every night, but also fixed breakfast and packed our lunches to take to school.  Never did figure out why bologna sandwiches always had mayonnaise and salami sandwiches came with butter, but to this day I often fix them that way.

We had a lot of take out food, too.  Pizza (which we picked up at the local pizza joint in North Beach) or Chinese food (which we had delivered).

My father was a meat and potatoes kind of guy (with a big dose of Italian wanna be....he loved anything Italian, though he did not have a drop of Italian blood in him), so we had a lot of roasts (mostly beef) with potatoes and always vegetables, sometimes a salad.  I never did get the "love of veggies" gene, though.

He was a railway mail clerk, which meant he worked the mail on a train from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  This meant he would leave one morning, be gone that night and return the following night.  On the nights he was gone my sister and I often had "dinners" like pancakes, or scrambled eggs, or my favorite, those new Swanson fried chicken TV dinners that had just come out.

I remember I talked my mother into making pancakes with pork gravy for me one morning, after she told me that it was her favorite breakfast as a kid.  I remember really loving it and still don't know why she never fixed it again.  She also made marrow bone dumplings for soup from time to time.  Those were my favorites, but she stopped making them too.

My father liked to experiment in the kitchen, often something Italian.  The very best calzone I ever had was one he made.  I don't know, this many years later, what made it so special, but I've never had another that lived up to what he made.

But he was best known for his potato salad.  I have not had one since that was the same.  He said that the secret was slicing the potatoes very thin.  He also used sweet pickles and always Best Food (or Hellman's) mayonnaise and lots of onions and parsley.  I was his taster, letting him know if it needed more salt or not.

I don't make his potato salad because it needs lots of onion and Walt doesn't like onion.  Also because I love it and would eat more than I should.

He was less successful with sweets and once made peanut butter cookies that you could drink.  I don't know whether he added too much liquid (and what liquid do you add to cookies anyway?) or too little flour?  But we teased him unmercifully about those peanut butter cookies for many years.

Oddly, I did not learn to cook when I was growing up.  Perfectionist that she was, my mother never wanted help in the kitchen, or tried to teach us.  She would rather do it herself.  I taught myself to cook by volunteering to cook for a bunch of guys in the house where Walt was living at U.C. Berkeley.  But I think I turned out to be a fair-to-middlin' cook after all.

Who Does the Cooking?

The prompt for today is;

Who does most of the cooking in your home?

That would be a combination of me and Bertolli Italian dinners.  On weekends, when I have a show to review in Sacramento, I haul out one of the reliable Bertolli dinners.  My cousin Kathy recommended them to me years ago when we were talking about the dreary boredom of having to find something to cook for two people every night.  I started buying them and it is now my routine to cook a Bertolli dinner before a show in Sacramento.  I generally don't eat much of it because I'm not usually hungry for pasta, so one bag is plenty for us to have a light dinner so that we are full, but don't fall asleep in whatever show I'm reviewing.

But as a general rule, I do all the cooking, sometimes even preparing it myself!  I used to actually cook, as in "create a meal" when we had kids and foreign guests here, but now that it's only Walt and myself, I still prepare meals most nights, but get lazy and use frozen dinners too.  Why go to the work of making lasagna for two people when Costco has a perfectly good lasagna that will serve us for two nights an all I have to do is heat it up.

Walt always makes is own lunch and gets pretty creative, with either Chinese or hot flavors -- usually a top ramen base with all sorts of vegetables added and then whatever flavor (sesame oil or sirracha) he wants to augment it with.

He rarely cooks dinner, which is fine because he does so much else around the house.  Years ago we found a book of Beer Cookery and he found a recipe for lamb chips with capers and beer that we both loved.  Every five years or so, he'll cook that and I always enjoy it.

The real cook in the family is Tom.  When he was still a kid living at home, he learned to make omelettes and made the best in the family.  We all loved it when Tom could whip up one of his special omelettes.  He was never afraid to try anything.  I once said that I thought he could go into the refrigerator and take out sardines, peanut butter and chopped olives and somehow come up with a dish that would be delicious.  This was in the days before shows like Chopped on the Food Network.  He'd be great on that show!

Then he started working in restaurants and honed his natural abilities as a cook and now whenever we go to visit his family, it's almost always Tom who cooks.  He's a terrific barbeque chef.  And I love that he is teaching Brianna to cook.  She made ... made ... spaghetti the other day.  That's something I've never done.  But he has one of those pasta rollers and he taught her how to use it.  

Ned is also a very good cook, though not quite as adventurous as Tom.  I'm not sure when he started cooking for himself, but he whips up an excellent meal...and is the best party planner around.

Jeri cooks some now, but I think most of the cooking is done by her husband Phil, or they do it together.

NaBloPoMo - DISH

The October theme:

This month, we're dishing on our favourite foods, sharing recipes (and the stories behind their creation), and reflecting on what we used to eat as kids. We're also looking at what dish we used to dread eating, and whether it's still our least favourite food.

I just joined BlogHer's NaBloPoMo, which is a month of daily blog entries.  These challenges are always such fun because I would do a month of daily blog entries anyway, so why not use it as an opportunity to get more readers, and to find more blogs to read?...to say nothing of having new ideas for interesting entries.  I don't know that I will follow all the prompts   (I just realized that I'll be on our cruise at the end of the month, so I'm sure I will have more interesting things to talk about than food), but at least there will be an entry a day! 

Apparently there are no prompts for the weekends, and I'm starting with a Saturday Entry, so I'll use the prompt for October 1 which was "tell us about your most beloved family dish."

My mother was a wonderful 'murrican cook.  She cooked plain, but everything she cooked was wonderful.  Fried chicken with shoestring fried potatoes, pot roast, meatloaf, roasts (beef and lamb, especially)...that kind of stuff.  When she got adventurous, she tried something like lasagna.  She made cakes from scratch and wonderful chocolate chip cookies.  One of my fondest memories of her is watching her sitting at the kitchen table, a big bowl between her knees to catch the apple peelings as she peeled and cut apples for apple pie.  We loved it when she made chocolate cream roll, a thin sponge cake filled with real whipped cream and frosted in a bittersweet chocolate frosting, the likes of which I have been unable to find.  My sister and I loved to lick the beaters and then to eat the "crusts" of the cake after it came out of the oven, before she rolled it in a powdered sugar covered towel to let it cool rolled up, to make adding the whipped cream later easier.

She had a cookbook, but I don't know how often she used it...and, being the Virgo that she is, when she decided she wouldn't be cooking any more, instead of asking me if I wanted the book, she just threw it away.

But the dinner that everyone loved the most, the one she made often for guests, was enchiladas, which seems an ambitious, unusual thing for someone who was such a basic cook to make.  But when I was very little--before I was old enough to remember--we had a Mexican neighbor who made them.  My parents loved them and so my mother asked Amalia to teach her how to make enchiladas.

I remember it was a many-day process for her, beginning with making her own chorizo.  The spices had to be blended just so and mixed in with the pork and then left in the fridge for 2 or 3 days. 

When it came time to assemble the enchiladas, it took the whole table, with a special sauce into which she dipped the tortillas, and then filled with ground beef, the chorizo, onions, olives, cheese and some other things.  Into the pan they went, topped with the remaining sauce into which she had dipped the tortillas, and topped with more cheese.

After they were baked, they were served, each on a romaine lettuce leaf and sprinkled with Parmesan.

I don't think I have had enchiladas since that I liked as much.  I did have her come to our house one time and show me how to make them, so I would know all the secrets.  At that time her mind had started to deteriorate and she wasn't sure she remembered right, but I did get the recipe.  I think I have made them once.  They were never the same as Momma used to make.