I love to cook. I am not a recipe creator, though I do modify recipes somewhat. I am not a trained chef—though I did look into changing my major from nutrition/food science to culinary arts (I decided not to change because the CA program was still fairly new at USU and to change would require at least another year and maybe two of college. I was engaged and planning to get married after I graduated). I simply enjoy creating something that looks good and tastes good from raw ingredients and sharing that with my family and friends.
My interest in cooking started way back when I was around 9 or so. My mom started a summer 4-H club with me and a few of my friends. We spent half the summer learning about cooking and the other half learning about sewing. Back then, I didn’t care at all about sewing. Threading a sewing machine was beyond me. But I *loved* the cooking segments. I was curious about what made foods change—why did cake batter start out thick and runny and end up in a fluffy, dry, solid cake? Why did milk go sour? Why did foods change color when they were cooked/baked? I don’t really recall discussing this science stuff but I’m sure we did.
I think it’s fascinating to look at a family’s culinary history. Why does a family eat the way they do? Why do they eat certain foods and not others? I have quite a few recipes that I like to make because I ate them growing up. For example, when I make meat loaf, I use my grandmother’s recipe. I also use her recipe for au gratin potatoes. There are lots of foods I remember that were always a part of our Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations.
Grandma Allen had a cookie cutter in the shape of a Santa Claus with a bag of toys slung over his back. During the Christmas season, she always had an ice cream bucket full of these Santa-shaped sugar cookies (which she kept in the freezer and then when company came, she’d pull them out to thaw). She would thin red food coloring with a bit of water and paint the cookies so you could see Santa’s red outfit. She’d use black for the boots and occasionally paint the bag green. I am happy to have a smaller size of that same cookie cutter.
When we had dinner with my Tanner grandparents, Grandma Tanner always made a potato salad that she served in a green bowl. No matter what we had for dinner, we almost always had the potato salad.
One of my favorite cooking-related memories is the time I decided to make chocolate chip cookies. I’m not sure how old I was—maybe 10 or 11? I was at a stage when I liked to bake cookies and would often just decide to make a batch. I must admit that I didn’t always follow the rule to check that you have everything you need for your dish before starting to cook. That particular day, we were out of eggs. Which I didn’t realize until I had already mixed up the shortening, sugar, brown sugar, vanilla and water. I suppose I could have run over to the neighbor’s to borrow two eggs (it WAS only 2 eggs. It wasn’t like I needed a dozen). Not sure why I didn’t do that. Anyway, I could have just stopped and covered the bowl and waited for my mom to get eggs. Hmm, I’m realizing there are a lot of holes in this memory. Was Mom home? Was she out? Was she busy? Well, ANYWAY, I *really* wanted those cookies and I wanted them NOW. Probably wanted the cookie dough as much as the cookies. *snicker*. So I thought about it and decided to just add water to the dough until it looked *right*. I went on to add the flour, sugar, baking soda and chocolate chips. So far, so good. Made the little dough balls and plopped them on the cookie sheets and baked them. Still looking pretty good. Got them out of the oven. They looked a bit odd—they didn’t spread into nice flat rounds—still kind of looked like the balls of dough I had started with. Maybe a bit flatter. No matter. I set them to cool. Then it was time to eat them—and they were HARD AS ROCKS. Only soaking them in milk made them soft enough to chew. I asked my mom about it. She admitted she didn’t know but told me to ask my Grandma Allen. So I told her about it and she gave me some technical explanation about the importance of eggs in baked goods. I can’t remember what she said but that experience taught me a few things.
1. Water is not a good substitute for eggs in cookies. Probably isn’t in most other baked goods.
2. No matter how much of a hurry you are in or how badly you want some particular treat, MAKE SURE you have everything you need BEFORE you start cooking.
3. Milk softens even hard-as-rocks cookies.
4. Grandmas know everything.
I went on to take some food-related home economics classes in middle and high school and somewhere in those adolescent years, I learned about the joys and virtues of menu planning. While I didn’t HAVE to do a lot of the cooking for my family, I did Sunday meals a lot. I went through a stage where how the table looked was just as important to me as the food. So cooking Sunday meals let me use our dining room, our good china, our table linens, and other cool stuff like candles and centerpieces. I did plan those meals to be sure we had foods from all 4 food groups. That was the beginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment