What's Cooking?

To say I am a bad cook is an understatement. I've been kicked out of a dozen kitchens so far.

Dad was the cook in our family - he was an army cook, so he knew how to get food out fast, efficiently, and with minimal fuss. There was no time to teach his kid, Mom was coming home soon and needed food. Mom was the teacher, but also not a great cook, and no time to learn, when there was teaching to do and papers to grade. So I was shoved to the side, with my curious questions and habit of being in exactly the wrong place when he was holding a heavy pot.

I also didn't fare as well in my grandmother's kitchen. She was a farmer's wife, and the meals weren't meant to be fancy, they were meant to get hot food on the table at twelve noon on the dot, when my grandfather and uncle would come in from the fields. It would take them exactly twenty-five minutes to shovel food in their mouths, five minutes to watch the weather report at the end of the newscast, then out the door again for more backbreaking work. Also no time for a curious child with questions, when there were dishes to be done afterward and other farm chores to do, then a quilt to sew. No extra food to experiment with, either.

My other grandmother... She was a decent cook, most of the time, but had a penchant to experiment when no experimenting was really needed. Her idea of "corned beef" was a pot roast with a can of corn poured over it. She was excited to get a chili pepper plant, then insisted we all try one, then got mad when we didn't like that much heat, and tried to prove it wasn't that bad by raking her hand through the plant and popping the whole handful in her mouth. It was scary watching her face turn red as she ran inside to heave her mistake graphically into the toilet. And when she won twenty-five pounds of bacon at a bingo game and decided we all needed to eat bacon till our ears bled, well let's just say that Polish stuffed cabbage leaves become inedible after the bacon is substituted for the sausage.

Somehow I overcooked basic pasta in water the first night of my married life. My husband took over cooking after that disaster. He's still the primary cook, and I spice what he makes. I'm good at that part, at least.

My parents and I were foodies before we knew it was a thing. My husband is now one too, from being around us so much.

And my parents and I toured the country. They actually pulled me out of sixth grade, and Mom tutored me across and back as we saw the sights. Mom claims she's eaten her way cross country and back, and she's not kidding. My most vivid memories of all those trips are associated with the foods we ate:

Abalone sandwiches in San Francisco. Lobster rolls in Bar Harbor. Manhattan clam chowder on Long Island, New York, and creamy New England clam chowder in Boston, Massachusetts. Conch fritters in Florida with the best Key lime pie ever made, and Parmesan grouper cheek sandwiches the next day. Brunswick stew in the Carolinas. Fried oysters in Chincoteague, Virginia, with bumbleberry pie. Local artisan cheeses in Vermont. Concretes in St. Louis, with a pizza on a crust so thin it's more like a cracker. Brisket in Texas. (Please don't tell my mom I also had Rocky Mountain oysters there, and they were amazing!) Homemade ice cream at an original soda fountain in Tennessee, gumbo in New Orleans with our beignets. Deep dish pizza in Chicago, margherita pizza in upper New Jersey. Chicken with red and green sauce in New Mexico, etouffe in Mississippi.

Here's an odd one - on that trip I mentioned, for sixth grade, we ended up in Organ Pipe National Monument on Easter. Even the locals were with their families, so it seemed that we had the entire place to ourselves past the lone person at the entrance gate. We picked a spot on the driving loop in the middle of nowhere, and Mom pulled out what we had. SPAM. We sat there, eating SPAM sandwiches on white bread, staring all around us at the amazing scenery. After a while, another car came cruising by, and suddenly stopped behind us. Backed up, a little forward, back again, then SWOOSH pulled into the parking space aside of us! Mom was really scared, nervously calling for my dad, and he was ready to do something if they were there to rob or hurt us. The door popped open, and a strange voice said, "Hey, are you from Pennsylvania?" (Our license plate might have given us away.) When Mom answered in the affirmative, it turns out, they were too! And though Pennsylvania's a big state, they lived about a half-hour from us! We shared our SPAM sandwiches and Doritos with strangers, made into new friends, in the middle of the Sonora desert with no other humans around.

Of course, there are those places that are long gone, and I still miss their food even when the building lies empty. A restaurant with an all-you-can-eat salad bar that was three walls long, decades before calabash restaurants were popular. The fish and chips place in Hershey that had the most amazing hush puppies. A funky restaurant in Reading, Pennsylvania, that had strawberries in every dish, and their cold strawberry soup was the best. A place on the Chesapeake bay with the best crab chowder, where you could tie your boat to the dock and eat after fishing on the bay. A little north, the place that had spoonbread so good, I'd hide the plate and pretend the waitress hadn't given us any, just to get more.

But me, I'm a crafter. I'm the granddaughter of an anthropologist / archeologist, and unfortunately it shows. Everyone knows that mine is definitely not a kitchen to walk into, see something burbling away happily on the stove, and grab a spoon to sample! I've had deer legs being rendered, to take the bones to make dice and needles out of them. I've had dye pots giving me glorious reds and greens and purples and yellows, and even got blue a few times from indigo I grew myself. Pewter casting has been known to happen, and please, if you try it, put a lid on it when you're done and turn off the heat if you don't cast the leftover liquid metal into ingots! There may be a previous apartment where we left a few shards of pewter in the ceiling because a large pool of metal can launch molten bits as it cools from the outside in. Putting that heavy cast iron lid back where it belongs also gives you lovely PWAGG-ANGGG-ANGG sounds when the shards ricochet.

So how do all these strange experiences form a coherence in the gumbo of my life? Spicing, usually. And ironically, my favorite spices are my favorite dye stuffs. Turmeric and cochineal (carminic acid) are my go-to favorite colors, and turmeric has become one of my favorite spices. Now that I've been diagnosed with both diabetes and a heart condition, moderate sugar and extremely low sodium are a must for me. So our slow-cook soups have become our standards, like chicken vegetable in a tomato base, with turmeric, dry mustard, bay leaf, garlic, bolete mushroom powder, onion powder and flakes, marjoram, basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, savory, sage, and maybe a touch of anise. Put four low-salt chicken breasts in the crock pot, add whatever veggies you feel like (usually it's corn, peas, green beans, chopped potatoes, carrots, and cauliflower), also add coarse-cut tomatoes and low-salt tomato paste. Add water or chicken stock or milk (or a combination of some or all of them) to fill up the pot. Add the seasonings I mentioned, about a tablespoon of each, or double that if you really like them. Ignore the ones you dislike. Then lock that puppy up and let it burble away happily on high till four hours pass. Open it up, cut up the chicken (we usually pull one breast to make into chicken parmesan sandwiches for lunch the next day), fish out the bay leaf or two and toss them, put the chicken chunks back in, top up the fluids if they're low, add mashed potato flakes if it needs to be thicker, add more spices if the flavor doesn't seem deep enough, let it cook for another hour till you can't stand it and have to feed like you're a ravening wolf. We usually top it with a few small diced chunks of low-salt cheese and a dollop of sour cream.

For dyeing? Gently simmer a water bath, add a metric boatload of turmeric (about a cup's worth), add your fabric (silk handkerchiefs are my favorite, they love to soak up color), let simmer for hours, pull out and rinse when you like the saturation of color. Cochineal is even more fun than turmeric some days, because depending on if you add an acid or a base it'll shift the color. Normally cochineal is bright red, but I've gotten anywhere from red-black to peach to deep purple to almost blue to pink. It depends on what minerals are in the water you use, and how much acid or base is added. For a great starter project, use a packet of saffron in a simmering water bath. You will get an amazing bright yellow with so little effort it looks like magic. Turmeric can be gritty, which can be difficult to wash out of the fabric. And turmeric can surprise you, like when you add a strong base to the dye and it goes shocking red. Surprise!

(And it helps, when you use edible spices as dyes, you don't have to keep your dye pots separate from your cooking pots. Once you get into adding metal salts to shift the colors, or start adding strong acids or bases, please use separate pots and utensils. I picked up my dye pots from yard sales and consignment shops for very cheap, and they've lasted this while time.)

No matter which recipe you use, enjoy!