meditation for me. If I go more than a few days without cooking, I start to get weird. I get bored really quickly with standard restaurant fare. I have lived only briefly without a kitchen and I nearly went crazy. I found a super cheap vegetarian restauratn near campus and I ate there everyday because the cook would make me something special.
I have my own kitchen now… the only person I could comfortably share it with is Keifel. Guests chefs are welcome, but I have a hard time not hovering. My latent type-A tendencies come out when someone else is in my kitchen. I am particular about my knives, especially. It isn’t that they are expensive, but my chef’s knife was a gift from my dad when I moved into my first rented house off-campus in, yikes, 1994. Dad, the man who taught me how to make goulash and stroganoff, is sadly gone, but I still have the knife and he’s there in the kitchen with me when I cook.
As are my grandparents who died before I was born but whose recipes fill my recipe box. They were all wonderful cooks. My mother’s father owned a restaurant. Her mother made the most amazing pork chops (I did eat pork chops at one time). My father’s mother was a home economist extraordinaire and I have her recipes for peach/pineapple marmalade and chili sauce. And my father’s father made home brew during Prohibition. The homebrew tradition somewhat continues, as my dad taught me to make wine. We started a batch before he got sick. It was the best we ever made.
My mom is a good cook, too. Though now she tends to get distracted and burn stuff. It worries me because I can remember when my grandmother’s memory started to go. She was my only living grandparent, so my brother and I spent some summers there. She served us moldy cake one time and we were too polite to tell her.
So while I am cooking up a storm in my kitchen, the meditation often turns to reminiscing. Though I miss all these people, there is a connection there, through them and back to the first people who threw that hunk of wildebeest into the fire to char. Now I am teaching the boychick to make biscuits like my mom. Because no southern cook worth their salt doesn’t know how to make biscuits.
