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Mom's
This is a page from a cookbook put out by the sister of Georgia Griffith, my boss on CompuServe. This page has the recipe I contributed, hot brie pasta. The page is held up by a magnet that looks like a bandaid. I got that at some Tupperware party years ago. Epicurious "I saw it on TV..." Emeril
Lagassi I am a theatre critic OK...so it's a new "career", but if you're interested in reading my reviews, go here WHAT I'M READING Lynn left this book for me; I'd just seen a discussion on Oprah about it and was anxious to read it. That's it for today!
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SOMETHING WITH CHICKEN IN IT 9 February 2001 We had one of my famous specialties for dinner: "something with chicken in it." I’m never sure what the "something" is going to be, but it will be....something. My other two specialties are "something with hamburger in it" and "something in a tortilla." I’m really not a bad cook. Quite good, when I want to be, I say humbly. But I’ve never been an adventuresome cook. I can take any recipe and either prepare it or adapt it to the ingredients on hand. I’m one of those "throw caution to the wind" sorts of cooks who always fixes something new for guests. Most of the time it works out (well, there was that nasty avocado incident--but let’s not talk about that). My memories of my mother's cooking when I was growing up was that she did fantastic basic stuff--things like meatloaf, pot roast (or any other roast), fried chicken, tuna casserole and that kind of thing. Her real adventure in cooking was making enchiladas. This was a 3-day project. She’d learned the technique from a Mexican neighbor and it involved making homemade chorizo, which had to age for 3 days, and then mixing it with the proper meats and spices. Your enchilada came served on a romaine lettuce leaf, sprinkled with parmesan cheese. They were the best enchiladas I've ever eaten--and still are. But basically her cooking was generally simple, but very good. She still makes the best turkey stuffing around, which I’ve never been able to duplicate. I never really learned to cook until I left home. I got a baptism by fire when I became kind of the "housemother" (or so I was called) for a group of guys living in a house owned by the Newman Center. It’s where I really got to know Walt, in fact. Each of the guys was assigned a night to cook and one of them couldn’t cook at all, so I agreed to cook dinner for the group that night. It evolved into my cooking dinner there every night. I had a budget of almost nothing and learned how to be very creative with breast of lamb, which at that time I could buy for ten cents a pound. When I moved into my own apartment, I started experimenting with food. I loved trying out new recipes and began collecting recipes and cookbooks. One roommate and I did a lot of experimenting with recipes that used bananas (don’t knock banana meatloaf unless you’ve tried it!) I really looked forward to being married and to experimenting with all sorts of new recipes. Walt’s gift to me when we married was two leather-bound copies of cookbooks from Gourmet magazine, engraved with my name. Throughout our marriage, I have done my share of fancy cooking. In the early years, I loved making Indian food, including making my own curry. I had cookbooks from all sorts of countries and really got into Chinese cooking after two courses from Martin Yan. I always loved picking up unusual cookbooks and had my specialties from each. I make a great risotto. I still have a large collection of cookbooks. I’ve even participated in putting several cookbooks together, starting with the infamous "Trifles from Tiny Tots," a cookbook for our nursery school, which my friend Char and I decided would be the place to put all of our own favorite recipes so we never had to use any other book but this one (it’s still a book I use a lot). There were many years where I made homemade soup on regular basis and I always made all of our own bread, loving to wander through a grain store in Oakland where I would buy things like cut wheat and soy flour or rye flower and then go home to experiment with it. It wasn’t easy being a good cook and raising kids. I’d work all day on some specialty that was usually greeted with turned up noses. And I learned why my mother was such a basic cook--it’s what kids eat. So we ate a lot of hamburger and chicken, because I knew it was something that the kids weren’t likely to refuse. When we started having foreign students living with us, I expanded my range of foods by including some of the traditional foods, especially from countries like Brasil and Chile. I make a mean feijoada, the black bean stew which is the national dish of Brasil. But I can also do a great pao de queijo, "little cheese breads," which I hear you can buy from sidewalk vendors in Rio de Janeiro. Pao de queijo is an amazing experience to make. I have never made it once when I wasn’t absolutely convinced that I’d ruined it. It’s made with tapioca flour, which--as I remember--you mix with water till it had the consistency of silly putty, and then fry this mixture in lard. Finally, you add grated Muenster cheese to it (there’s more to it than that, but that's the basic idea). You end up with this glopy stuff that is rock hard and grey and at that point you are convinced you’ve done something terribly wrong. But then after you let this mess chill and then pull off balls of it and bake them, you end up with the most delicious tasting thing ever. About a bazillion calories each, but who cares? But you know, after 35 years of meals, you do reach a point where it just isn’t the thrill it once was. Despite hundreds of cookbooks, the thought of actually thinking about what to cook just seems like too much effort. Now when it comes time to cook dinner, I open the freezer and take out some frozen chicken breasts and try to be inspired. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. Fortunately, Walt will eat anything. |
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Some pictures from this journal |
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Created 2/7/01 by Bev Sykes |
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