Chapter 7- What’s the recipe? There is no recipe, you just know when the texture is right.11/4/2019 I came to cooking late in life. Soon after getting married and moving into our first house, we had our first child which meant that I stopped going to work. It also meant we could no longer afford to eat in restaurants several times a week. Being stuck on the couch as I was, either breastfeeding or making another human being on the inside, I watched a lot of television during the day. Other than Rosie O'Donnell or Ellen DeGeneres there wasn't much that captured my interest besides cooking shows or DIY home improvement shows. I watched a lot of Emeril] and Rachael Ray, but my all-time favorite was Alton Brown's "Good Eats". It based recipes on chemistry, and told you how to make things feel a certain way in your mouth or why flavor combinations worked. I had always been interested in the how of things. This show combined all of the things that I loved about learning and cooking in thirty minutes. I guess all that TV show watching paid off. I wanted to make nutritious food for my family. I also wanted to create customs and traditions that my family could look back on and remember fondly. I wanted food that tasted good and was kosher. I wanted to be able to afford to eat good food, so that meant no more prepared food. It meant learning how to make everything from scratch and adjusting things so that they were healthier and followed the rules of keeping a kosher house. I started by making challah every week. Then I added cookies to go with the challah. Then it became the matter of surviving Passover, which if you've ever kept kosher during Passover you understand that you have to cook from scratch. If you don't cook from scratch and you choose to use the box meals that are prepared kosher for Passover, you will also need heavy stock in prunes or prune juice or you will understand what is meant when one calls it the bread of affliction. Over the years, I practiced some more. I came up with substitutions for dairy products when cooking meat. I turned lots and lots of things into vegetarian meals.I would utilize vegetarian "meat "to make lasagna. When that got old I found the joys of vegetarian non-dairy cheese and tried it that way. All in all the food that came out of my kitchen was pretty darn good. The kids got a little older and they'd start helping. I created a website with my recipes. It’s soon become apparent that there really wasn't a recipe. It was all about texture. so I had to teach the kids how to make my stuff by making it with them. They would often ask, "How much of this do you put in Mom?" Instead of giving them a measurement I would say," until it looks like this.. or until it feels like this.." Challah making lead to pizza making and stromboli making and calzone making and empanada making and biscuits and cake and pie and anything else that people wanted to eat. One of the problems with being a good cook or enjoying the food that you make, is that it becomes difficult to eat in a restaurant without thinking about what made the flavors, or what would make it taste better. The kids got used to a certain level of cuisine in the house and had to be taught not to say things like," This is good, but not as good as Mommy makes." Thus began my love of seeing how far you can push a material. When I dieted, I figured out how to make cookies and cakes that still tasted good by substituting applesauce or banana for the fat. When certain family members decided that they were vegan, I learned how to make cookies and things that tasted good using egg replacer. When neighbors had children that had certain food allergies, I learned how to make things that they could eat that would taste good and not make them sick. AllAlll of these things were learned by using the outlines of other people's recipes, but there was very little measuring per se. I would often make a recipe perfectly measured the first time, and after figuring out why the ingredients work the way they did I would let go of measuring and go back to seeing what it looked like. We often joked that there should be a camera in the kitchen so that we could watch me cook so that we could make things that we liked again in the same way. This never happened, but somehow it seemed that food that I made by sight or feel always tasted better the next time. And then came the need to financially tighten our belt. I started meal planning so that I would only purchase things in the supermarket that were on our meal plan. This prevented food rotting in the refrigerator as well as the inevitable question,"What do you want for dinner?" When things got boring or too routine we'd make a family activity out of looking through cookbooks or magazines to find new flavors or new combinations of flavors that we all liked. The time came when I was able to go back to work and this made it possible for us to go out to eat once in awhile. We would do research when we would go to restaurants. Trying new things made going to restaurants more of an adventure and fun again.
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AuthorI make stuff. Sometimes the stuff is pretty, sometimes not. My wife, 2 dogs, 3 kids and 3 cats keep me busy and on my toes. Archives
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