Linda, I will cook with you any time.
Memories new and old:
My paternal grandmother and mother made matzo brei. It was pretty awful. I’ve researched and experimented and have my version that is comfort food. The only thing that has survived my family version is “one egg per cracker.”
Grandma Linahan’s macaroni salad. I have no idea who Grandma Linahan is. Recipe clipped from Parade or Good Housekeeping in the very early 80s and one of my first exercises in independent cooking. I love it.
Peanut sauce. My late Thai sister-in-law taught me. We have a picture somewhere of me sitting cross-legged on the floor with a one-gallon mortar and a pestle the size of a baby’s arm pounding peanuts under Lamoun’s watchful eye. You can’t make peanut sauce if you don’t start with peanuts. When I got it right Moonie (nickname) gave me a big mortar and pestle of my own which I still treasure.
Sticky rice. Another Moonie teaching. She gave me a steaming cone that fits in the mortar. Very efficient.
Lasagna. Another early independent cooking experience. I’ve posted before that my wife’s entirely Italian family likes my lasagna best. I’m proud of that.
Mussels. I was a young GS-13 on a trip overseas as a subject matter expert. My boss got very ill and flew home and I ended up in a one on one dinner meeting with a government minister. I didn’t cause a war. He ordered for us both and I ate mussels for the first time. Very nostalgic for me. We ended up with an international agreement to sign and my agency director authorized me to sign it for the country.
Meadle. Mix of elbow macaroni, ground beef, diced tomato, onion, bell pepper, whatever else is floating around. My mother made this when money was tight. Mine is better. grin I make this in bulk, vacuum seal it, freeze it, and take it on deliveries. My crews really like it.
Chicken Tikka Masala was the first thing I really made by looking at a number of recipes and generating my own.
Meatloaf was the first time I looked at recipes and decided they were stupid and did something different and had it work.
Nostalgia I don’t eat: my first cooking ever was a sandwich, rye bread with ketchup and potato chips. My taste is toward sourdough now, I don’t use much ketchup, and I don’t eat potato chips but I think about that sandwich from time to time. That experience is where my personal aphorism to “eat my mistakes” comes from.
Failure story: big family Thanksgiving in New Jersey. Shooed my wife, her sister, two brother, all but one spouse, FIL, and a passle of kids out to an amusement park. Remaining SIL and I made dinner. Partway through prep we discovered that cancelling the timer on the fancy new range turned off the oven. sigh We caught it after about a half hour. We managed to recover and dinner was only a little late. Turkey was not my best work but rescued without being dry (butter was my friend). Getting the rest of what we were making to hold was actually the biggest challenge. That SIL by the way is a vegetarian. Major lesson learned: get noncombatants out of the kitchen and preferably out of the house.
