Recipes...



My Mom is a great cook. When I was a young (uh ... younger, I mean), her creations generally ran to the hearty, stick-to-your ribs sorts of dinners: salisbury steak and potatoes, lots of casseroles, meatloaf, fried chicken, etc. Dishes that today we call "comfort food." I didn't realize how lucky I was until I got a little older and started eating over at my friends' houses. I'd wonder how my friends could stomach the things their mothers served. Even dishes that looked and sounded like things Mom would make would end up tasting like dog food. And college food? The food at my alma mater was, I'm told, quite good food for college dorm food. At least that's what my friends told me. Having been brought up on my Mom's great cooking though, I thought it was a vicious attempt on the part of the College's religious authorities to concretely illustrate the doctrine of total depravity.

So, when it was time for me to strike out on my own, I asked Mom for a bunch of her recipes. This was a little problematic as she doesn't actually use recipes. She just throws stuff together, occasionally substituting ingredients, measuring by sight and taste and feel. My husband cooks the same way. (Let's not over-analyze that, shall we?) I'm always in awe of this kind of cooking. If I could, I would only measure ingredients with volumetric flasks and Ohaus Analytical Scales (to 4 decimal places, of course.)

Anyway, I'd attempt to show off my culinary genius and make some of her recipes for housemates but they never quite turned out correctly. They were good, but just not quite right. For example, I would carefully follow her chili recipe and when it was finished it was yummy, and thick, and tasty (yes, people in Michigan do indeed know how to make chili) but there was something missing. Years later, I realized that many of the recipes Mom had written down were missing key ingredients. (I could tell you the secret to her chili, which I eventually found out, but I'm afraid I'd be disowned.)

Well, the other night I was asking her for a recipe for her bean soup. (Bean soup is just white northern beans and some sort of pig product, either ham, bacon, or, if you're feeling particularly daring, ham hocks. Most people I've met don't even realize pigs have hocks, nor can they imagine what part of the animal a hock is, but trust me they're good in bean soup.) She again protested that doesn't have a recipe and that she just throws stuff together. As she's saying this, I heard my older brother in the background say, "Yeah, and she always leaves things out." (So apparently I'm not the only one to have received her slightly altered recipes.) Mom laughed and then it happened. She let it slip. The secret to her chocolate chip cookies. "Oh, you mean like the _____ I put in the chocolate chip cookies?"

Bingo.

I'd always assumed Mom just used the Tollhouse recipe. After all, I'd always seen the same ancient piece of yellow plastic with a recipe printed on it from the back of some bag of chocolate chips from the1960s. But whenever I made those cookies, they were never quite right.

But now I've hit pay dirt! Mwah ha ha ha! I know the secret! And that secret is ..... *aaahhhhhhgggg* *cough* *choke*

Posted: Thu - September 21, 2006 at 08:01 AM        

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