Essays from the kitchen: on cooking & life.
You Can’t Hide the Peas
Sitting at the dinner table, every bite was a battle. The peas—those tiny green…taunting with the obnoxious color, their texture, taste. I cringe at the mention, even still. It’s an all-consuming disgust, visceral.
Mom served up a dreaded casserole with peas that night.
The perfect storm of my least favorite things in one plate: soft noodles, chunks of some sort of meat (I can’t remember, but I think it was chicken as Mom wouldn’t allow fish in the house), some sort of white sauce and — peas. I was stuck in a battle with my stomach, staring at the mound of it.
Carol Campbell’s Brownies
My mom was known as an amazing cook and baker – and you could tell she was proud of it. You could tell by her focus in the kitchen - in her menu planning, in the preparations, and the way she shopped on Thursday marketing day. She just put her head down and did it, tried things, cooked, baked, loaves of bread, canned jams, pickles and more.
You may know that recipe sharing is somewhat of a controversy at times. In “the old days” recipes had the names of the originator on them, and most of the recipes in my mom’s books have them – yet, you’d sometimes find some discrepancies.
Thursdays
It was usually on Thursdays that I woke up and felt a little tickle in my throat. A little cough coming on. Lethargy.
Mom would leave the room and turn up the space heater in the bathroom where we got dressed in the mornings, as I’d sniffle and moan and cough louder… watching her from the corner of my eye as she finally came to the decision that I’d be staying home from school that day.
Mimi’s Chocolate Cake
Mimi’s Chocolate Cake was my great grandmother’s recipe and THE cake that was made for every birthday. In fact it may have been my great great grandmother’s recipe, but somehow the story changed (AS DID THE RECIPE, wait for it…). The origin was even argued upon a few times, leading up to my mom’s passing.
Family members competed…“Who makes it better?”We are still not sure who did, or does. We are all just happy to just have any version of the cake served to us, at any time. The light chocolate old fashioned dense-ish cake with the very sweet light chocolate sugary frosting was killer.
The Frito Salad
So it turns out there is no Frito Salad recipe in the salad book.
What got me excited about it was the memory of having REAL snack food at dinner. You see, we weren’t allowed to eat real snacks and as a kid it was the most depriving thing in the world. We were the kids with no fun food at their house.
Starving after school? Have some carrots. An apple would be fine,. Some celery with peanut butter would stick to our ribs, and well, you know, celery has snack-crunch.