When I went off to university I had never lived away from home before, and had grown up on my Mom’s home cooking.

I moved into a very large dormitory nicknamed “The Zoo”. It had a very large cafeteria staffed by old ladies in white smocks and hair-nets.

Dinner the first Tuesday night was roasted chicken. I took my tray of food to the seating area and joined my fellow scholars, who had arrived from far and wide, with various upbringings and food traditions.

Everyone else at the table was saying, “Eew, this chicken is so gross, let’s get Swiss Chalet.” (I.e. take-out chicken.).

Yes, the chicken was over-cooked, from sitting in the warming pans for maybe an hour. Yes, it was rubbery and salty, yet still somehow tasteless, with bland side-dishes.

But I loved it.

I even went back for seconds. My mom’s chicken was sometimes burnt, or sometimes still red-pink inside. Never the same twice, and usually hard to eat. I had just gotten used to it.

The next night it was hamburgers. Again, over-cooked from sitting in the warming trays, and salty, with a side-order of bland. Everyone hated it, but I wanted more. And fries, too! I was in heaven.

At home, burgers were often cheap, nitrate-injected pucks of non-meat filler, and either too pink or too black to eat. Lots of ketchup, mustard and relish were needed to get it down. That was just normal for me.

Next night: lasagna. A similar story.

The night after that: tacos and burritos. Same reactions - everyone else hated it; I loved it.

This went on at every meal, all week.

Then Tuesday night came around again, and it was roasted chicken again, cooked exactly the same way as before. Exactly the same!

The next night, burgers again. Cooked just the same again. And fries again!

That’s when I realized: it was going to be the same seven dishes, on the same nights of the week, cooked exactly the same way, every single time.

And it was going to be that way, for the next EIGHT MONTHS.

Everyone else was disgusted.

But I was soooo happy, that I nearly cried, right there at the cafeteria table, in front of my new friends.

Because this was the best, most consistent food I’d ever had, in my whole 19 years of life.

And that was when I realized:

My Mom was a terrible cook!

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[Edit note: lots of views, so I fixed things up a bit for an Enhanced Reader Experience.]

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Update: something I just remembered.

As a kid, I hated spinach, despite all the claims that it would make me strong like Popeye.

Years later, someone asked me why I didn’t like it. I said, “Because it is so gritty, and it hurts my teeth.”

That’s when I found out that most spinach is grown in sandy soil.

So when you get it home, you are supposed to wash it, to get all the sand out.

I’d been eating sandy spinach my whole life.

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Update Again:

At that cafeteria, I once found a metal staple in the mashed potatoes I was chewing. And my friend Rob found a piece of orange plastic in the sliced carrots.

But it was still the best food I had ever eaten.

After I grew up, my mother confessed to me that when I was little, she cooked food we didn't like on purpose, so there would be more leftovers. Money was tight and she was able to cut the grocery bill in half this way.

Still, even after our situation improved, she was never a great cook. She wasn't a bad cook per se, just a very timid one. Nothing was ever seasoned - she was afraid of getting it wrong. One time I opened her spice drawer and found the same spices I remembered as a kid. Not just the same types of spices, but literally the same jars. Most of them had dates in the 70's on them. They had moved with her from New York to Washington to California to Michigan over the years.

We almost never went to restaurants, so I really didn't learn that food could have flavor and interest until I went to college and ate at the cafeteria - and that was institutional cooking.

But the real kicker was about ten years ago when she told me “I've just learned about the most amazing thing. It makes food taste so much better. Pepper! Have you ever tried it?”

I love my mom, so I kept my mouth shut. But yes, I have tried pepper. In the college cafeteria.

I can literally remember the day it happened.

I was about eighteen, and my then boyfriend and I went to a restaurant together. I ordered roast beef because I loved the sides that came with roast beef. Mashed potatoes, gravy, yorkshire pudding, veg, mmm.

When my food came, I ate some mashed potatoes, and then I cut into my roast beef and was horrified. They had drastically undercooked it, I was sure that even a single bite would give me food poisoning!

My boyfriend saw the look on my face and asked what was wrong. Not wanting to complain, I lowered my voice and said: “It’s—it’s moist.” (yes, I used the word moist)

Naturally, he gave me a confused look and asked why that was a problem, and we had a conversation, where I essentially informed him that roast beef was supposed to be dry, and even a little hard, and he insisted that, no, it should be tender and juicy.

But it was one of those conversations where, even as I was making my points, I was starting to realize I was wrong. Roast beef was NOT supposed to be hard and dry, and only made palatable by being buried in mashed potatoes and gravy. I was NOT going to get food poisoning from a roast that was cooked to perfection.

That was the first time I actually realized my Mom was not a good cook (sorry, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day!).

It was eye opening, and as I moved forward in life, I realized what things were supposed to taste like.

Her yorkshire pudding was nothing like anyone else’s yorkshire pudding, although I do still think hers is good.
Her pasta was so insanely overcooked that it was waterlogged and inedible, and I had always assumed that was just what pasta tasted like.
Her meats were always overcooked, and sometimes even charred, to the point that as an adult, I actually like charred chicken. Like, if chicken has a layer of black on it, I’m totally cool with that.

You name it, my Mom has destroyed it, and her three children had no idea that that wasn’t what food was supposed to taste like. It should not be surprising that all three of us were absolutely scrawny children, lol. She was always so worried about giving us food poisoning that she overcooked everything to insane degrees.

Her cooking has much improved. She uses meat thermometers now, and she follows recipes more closely.

I still prefer my meats to be burned, I still love her strange, flat yorkshire puddings, and I’ve discovered that pasta is actually delicious.

But whenever I cook for others I worry, is this how it’s supposed to look, or am I just doing what my Mom did, and overcooking things because that’s how I’m used to it tasting?

EDITED to add: My Dad, apparently, was/is an even worse cook than my Mom. I just don’t have any recollection of his cooking. I don’t think he’s cooked anything more than toast since I was a small child, and apparently it’s for a good reason.

My older sister is four years older than I am, and she remembers a time when my Dad made her soup. It was canned soup, cream of something or other, so you’d think it would be pretty easy, right? Add milk, stir, heat. Simple. Except my Dad didn’t read the instructions.

He added water, and didn’t bother stirring, so he served my sister hot water with chunks of cold, congealed soup concentrate floating in it. She was so upset she still talks about it occasionally, and my Dad hasn’t cooked since.

The first day I had a bite of real roast beef.

When I was a kid, I always hated “roast beef day” (this was before we lived “on the farm”, and things went bad).

Mom would cook a roast by putting it in a pan, and then cooking it at 350 degrees. For three hours. Not a trace of pink would be left in it anywhere. It had a thick crust on it. The inside was kind of like shoe leather. She’d serve that with heated up canned peas, or maybe some canned spinach (both boiled for 10 minutes!). Worst was the canned beets - just getting a bite near my mouth would make me nauseated.

I always thought “Man, adult food is terrible. Maybe something happens to you when you go through puberty, and all of a sudden this stuff must taste great.” I couldn’t imagine what bizarre biological process must happen in puberty to change your taste buds. But it had to be true. Why else would people willingly eat this crap, I thought. Roast beef! Yuck! The only thing I could imagine that was worse was steak. That was like chewing burnt rubber. And peas? Let’s not go there.

I pretty much went through life like this. During college, I got a job at a steakhouse. One of the things we cooked was Prime Rib - Basically, it was a big slab of roast beef - and we only cooked it for 55 minutes, not three hours. Something wasn’t right. I learned that beef could be cooked different ways. Most people ate it cooked “medium” or “medium rare”. A few like “medium well”. I learned that what my mother cooked was “Extra well done”.

I tried a piece of the prime rib cooked medium. It was absolutely the best beef I had ever tasted. Yeah, it had pink in it. But man it was tasty. And Peas? We only served fresh peas. I tried them - Wow! No wonder people eat peas - they taste great! And fresh spinach, fried with butter! I’m in heaven!

From that point on, I was a firm believer that you had to cook food right. When I had my own family, I introduced my kids to ‘Medium Rare’ ribeyes, and they loved them. It was quite funny to sit down with a 6 and 8-year-old (they’re much older now), and see the look on the waitresses face when she would expect them to order a hotdog or nuggets, and get the “I’ll have a ribeye cooked medium rare” order (they would share):

So, now I happily love “Roast Beef Day” at our house. And I love fresh cooked spinach, and fresh cooked peas.

But I still hate beets. That food is not allowed in my house.

Oh, some part of me always knew. When I was a kid, I thought they just liked their food very bland and overcooked, plus my mother had pretty extreme ideas about food safety, etc (if meat isn’t absolutely burned to death you will definitely die from eating it, if boiling water splashes on anything it will start a fire because it’s hot, unopened cans of tuna have to be stored in the fridge or it’s not safe to eat, and a whole slew of other nonsensical things that made less and less sense as I got older).

Only salt and pepper were allowed in the house for seasoning, and were rarely used anyway.

Let me walk you through a few gross examples before I get to my favorite one.

My father’s two favorite meals were spaghetti (no, not spaghetti with sauce; JUST plain spaghetti), and chicken soup (which was literally boiled carrots, boiled chicken, noodles and water; no seasoning, not even onion; it tasted exactly like it sounds). I grew up believing that he just couldn’t stomach strong flavors, so he cooked the blandest possible meals.

My mother thought she was the greatest cook who ever lived, but the reality was very much the opposite. She bought a lot of pre-packaged, just-add-water things, and frozen and canned things that only needed heating, and somehow it always tasted weird anyway once it made its way onto a plate.

The only things she actually cooked were meatloaf (nicknamed “meteorite” by my brother because it was literally a giant ball of ground beef and nothing else, baked in the oven until completely dry with a thick burnt outer shell), “chili” (can of kidney beans, can of tomato soup, chunks of burnt ground beef, that’s it), and mashed potatoes or plain noodles, almost liquified from overcooking to “make sure it’s not still ‘raw’ and dangerous”.

Meanwhile, I learned to cook (and clean, something neither of my parents thought was ever necessary to do) from watching my grandmother, so the older I got the more noticeable my parents’ half-assed cooking and strange ideas about food safety were to me. But enough about that. Let’s get to my favorite clueless cooking memory.

One Christmas, my brother got one of those electronic quesadilla makers as a gift. You know, the one that’s similar to a waffle maker and uses the big tortillas to make the American restaurant appetizer style quesadillas. One of those. He was excited to try it out, so they bought some big tortillas and shredded cheese, enthusiastically bit into their creation, and instantly started complaining that the appliance didn’t work and they’re going to exchange it immediately.

I was a teenager then, so sarcastic me just couldn’t resist. I asked why they felt it wasn’t working properly, and they both replied “because this doesn’t TASTE like the quesadillas at the restaurant! It says on the box that it makes quesadillas, but this tastes weird!”. I replied, “well, what did you put in it?”. My mother said, “tortillas and cheese! What would YOU put in it?”, as if I was stupid for asking.

I said, “I would have added the appropriate seasonings at least so it would taste like a quesadilla….?”. Both of them erupted into laughter at my “ridiculous” suggestion. They genuinely believed that the appliance did some kind of magic when it was plugged in and just made the correct flavor happen somehow.

My attempts to explain how flavors actually happen, why it tasted so bland and that the weird taste probably also had to do with not cleaning the thing before using it, were met with roaring laughter and further insults to my intelligence. So I gave up and off they went to “exchange it for one that works”. I can only imagine how that went… They came back empty-handed.

That cooking “duh moment” was always my favorite. It was that day that I realized my parents learned to eat their own bland cooking and pretend they liked it that way, because they didn’t understand the concept of seasoning and just assumed you could will flavors into the food with your mind, or use some magic machine to do it.

They thought restaurant food had more flavor because restaurants must have fancier appliances. They walked past the entire aisle of seasonings in the grocery store and never thought for one second what those were for. And they taught my brother the same. Wow…

Younger than 7. I say it that way because at 7 is when I did something about it.

My mom had 3 dishes that she could cook with any skill. Mashed potato pie, Italian beef and banana bread. That's it. The only edible things she made. My step-dad did pancakes.

I was a latch key kid with a 12 year old babysitter (this was back in the 80s.) Dinner was chicken pot pies or leftovers that didn't taste good the first time. So at 7 I grabbed a cookbook off the top of the fridge and went to town. I never looked back.

Admittedly she knew she was a bad cook. By 8 or 9 instead of baking goodies for me to take to school, she asked me to bake them for her to take to work. Before I started cooking I thought cookies were supposed to be as hard as bricks.

Luckily she encouraged me and indulged me by letting me write shopping lists. I encourage my kids to cook now as well, although I actually supervise them.

My parents married when my mother was a month away from turning 17 years old and my father was 21. They didn’t realize it at the time (though they were suspicious), but my mom was pregnant with me when the nuptials happened. My maternal grandmother was a single parent of 8 children and worked nights so she often made a casserole and left instructions for my mom to put the casserole in the oven at whatever temperature for however long. So when she married my father, she thought she could cook. She couldn’t. And my maternal grandmother wasn’t much help and not a good cook, either, though she did better at the time than my mom could. My paternal grandmother showed my mom how to cook, the basics. Which was really all she could teach as she wasn’t much of a cook, either.

I thought, as a child, that Mom was a really good cook. Much better than my grandmothers. Of course, this was back in the days when people regularly bought boxed meal starters like Hamburger Helper and boxed side dishes like Betty Crocker scalloped potatoes and au gratin potatoes and canned goods were staples in our pantry. I had never had a green bean or a mushroom or corn that didn’t come out of a can or jar. Even potatoes were rarely made from a fresh potato. Rice dishes often came in a box, too, including things like Rice-a-Roni. Our biscuits and pancakes came from a box of Bisquik. Ingredients like onions and garlic could be found in powdered form. Everyone cooked this way, not just my family. This was the 1970’s and 1980’s and our way of cooking wasn’t all that unusual. But my mom’s cooking hasn’t changed much… my daughter doesn’t understand how I could say she was ever a good cook and I get it because her cooking really hasn’t changed, but my palate has.

When I moved out on my own around my early 20’s, I remember taking one of my mom’s go to recipes and “elevating” it. I thought I was so clever, using fresh mushrooms instead of canned and real onions and garlic instead of powdered, none of which were properly cooked before I threw them into the sauce. It was much tastier, but not quite good cooking. I hadn’t stopped buying convenience foods yet, but it wouldn’t take long before I did. Now I buy very few things in cans or even frozen. I can’t tell you the last time I had Hamburger Helper (probably about 26 years ago) or those Betty Crocker potatoes (longer than 26 years ago). I know the difference between cooking something from scratch and heating something up. I’ve even started using recipes to replicate things like green bean casserole without using any convenience ingredients. That’s right, no cream of mushroom soup.

That recipe I elevated when I was 21 now starts with a mirepoix of fresh onions, carrots, and celery, slowly cooked before adding fresh garlic, being careful not to burn it, then pushing it all to the sides of the pot and adding mushrooms a handful at a time so I don’t overcrowd the pot and sauteing them in olive oil and pushing to the side as they become browned. I add in a few cups of red wine, not cooking wine, and cook off the alcohol. I brown fresh Italian sausage in the oven before slicing them up (a new idea of mine) and brown the ground sirloin (not just general ground beef) in a separate pot before adding to the sauce. The only canned ingredients are added (diced tomatoes and tomato paste) and then the whole is seasoned with coarse kosher salt, freshly ground pepper, sugar, and either fresh basil or oregano (or some that I dried from fresh). This is cooked down for an hour or more before serving over al dente pasta (my mom’s was over cooked) with freshly shaved Parmesan cheese (instead of the stinky shaker cheese that didn’t have to be refrigerated). You can’t even tell that this came from the recipe my mom used back in the 1970’s.

My mom asks a lot of questions while I cook, if she is around while I’m doing so. I’ve bought her house and she lives in an apartment in our backyard, so she’s around often. She’s terribly curious as to how I do everything, even if she will compare what she did in the past to how I do things now, suggesting she knows better than me (she washed her cast iron skillet and dried it on the oven so it didn’t rust, mine has never been touched by dishwater and is cleaned with a salt and oil scrub… she thinks her way is better). I’ve shared recipes and meals with her and she swears she doesn’t remember how to fry chicken. I do have to say, though, she is an excellent baker.

My mom and dad grew up in the depression era. My mom came from a family of eight with an uneducated, newly immigrant father who barely earned minimum wage all his life. They subsisted on a lot of soups, beans, and greens. Even a common chicken would have been offered up only on a very special occasion.

When she got married, there still wasn’t much money, so my parents continued to eat in the depression era style that they always did. Dad was still in electronics school and they were attempting to start a business. Even when they advanced themselves to upper middle class, when their business became successful and their investments grew, they never translated that success into the meals they prepared. It wasn’t until I grew older that I realized sandwiches were supposed to have more than a single slice of luncheon meat, that one does not use 75% lean hamburger to make meatballs for spaghetti sauce (it leaves a pool of oil floating on top), that beans and macaroni (or beans with escarole) did not have to be a meal in and of itself and that there were other cuts of meats in the world besides assorted pork chops and top round steaks! When I went to college, I was the only one who enjoyed the cafeteria food (that should have been a tip off as to the quality of mom’s cooking) and could never understand why my friends complained about it all the time. Now I realize it was actually a step up from mom’s meals.

Because this was the cooking I grew up with, I always thought it was great….until I got married. My wife’s cooking was FANTASTIC and she prepared some of the best meals I had ever eaten. Her food was always good, not only due her skills in the kitchen, but also due to the quality of food and produce that she selected. My cousins still rave about her homemade sauce with its three-meat meatballs, braciole, sausages, pork and beef. And she hands down makes the best chicken soup I’ve ever tasted in my 71 years on this planet. Now that’s a meal in and of itself!

I realize now that my mom had the potential to be a wonderful cook, but she was hamstrung by her food choices….food choices that had been dictated for years by the lack of money during hard economic times; yet, she never changed her food buying habits right up to the day that she passed away.

As a teenager. By then, I had noticed that everything I had at someone else’s house tasted really great. Of course, that is a typical teen reaction to something novel.

There were a few factors involved. We weren’t rich, we lived in a very small town, this was before the Internet, and Shake and Bake chicken was considered good.

We had goulash, which was elbow macaroni, Ragu, and a pound of hamburger at least 3 nights a week.

Even worse was when the goulash would be frozen, and taken out a month later infused with that freezer aroma . To this day, I refuse to freeze leftovers. God awful.

My mother had different tastes. She liked chuck roast. I think it is too fatty. I use top round instead.

She would make a salad with a lot of celery and radish. Not for me.

She also liked instant coffee. haha.

We never had a whole roast chicken, for example. When we had so-called pork chops, I wanted to run away. A horrible scrap of nasty meat, with 2 bites at most.

I think she just didn’t know. This is how she grew up eating.

We didn’t keep garlic in the house, or many other spices.

But when our family was flush for a bit, we had steak a lot.

I do miss her macaroni salad.

I definitely miss her.

As soon as I tasted the foods they prepared. Plus they got worse over the years as my father started getting more extreme in his avoidance of fats and salt, thus most dinners were overcooked and boiled, with no salt or seasoning. I still remember asking my mother when I was only 4 why the yolks of the hard boiled eggs she had made were gray.

I was 18, on a date at a remote (and romantic) country cabin, he bought the groceries for our cook-out. Hamburger meat and buns to grill burgers outside. He took the (minced) hamburger, formed it into patties and threw them on the grill to cook.

I thought… I was going to be poisoned - here I am, miles from home and it’s the last anyone would see of me. Where was the egg? Where were the breadcrumbs? Surely he is risking putting RAW meat without any additives onto flame. In my house, you had to prepare the meat with several additives to make it meal-worthy.

It was a transforming moment thinking that perhaps, the additional ingredients weren’t necessary, and maybe, my family did this to stretch a meager budget to feed 7 people and just maybe that’s how NORMAL families cook burgers. He was a pretty nice guy, healthy…maybe he wasn’t trying to poison me. :-)

I survived, and realized everything my family cooked was a relatively crap version of real food. Just like canned vegetables vs fresh and don’t get me started on cheese…

Growing up, we ALWAYS ate home cooked food. I learnt how to cook quickly. But when I got married, I made a simple rice and Dal dish for the first time.

my sister in law tasted the rice and said, “you didn’t add salt?” You see, I never realise until marriage, my mother never add Salt in cooking. I asked her one day, she told me, when she was growing up people always said Salt is very bad for health, so she never added salt LOL. here’s my cooking:

It took me until college, really.

I wasn't ever a picky eater, and my parents were way more than fine with me not eating (“You’ll eat what's in front of you” mentality). So tuna casserole with those crunchy canned onions on top, beef stroganoff a la Hamburger Helper, taco salad, or Lean Cuisine frozen meals it was. My mom used only margarine and tended to cook meat to death.

My favorite Lean Cusine meal above.

I do think my mom tried her best (what with being in one of the most abusive marriages I’ve heard of), and my grandma never had time to cook because she was a working single mom with 3 children.

So it all cascaded to me just eating at my sorority house for 2 years. My first year after I dropped the sorority I felt myself at the edge of a dangerous cliff — no friends, no meal plan, all alone in college. Hell I'll learn how to cook, I said. And I did. I really truly did. Cook with the good stuff too….I rode my bike to the local grocers and to a nearby Farmer’s market on Thursdays and another market on Saturdays if there was anything I had forgotten. I talked to farmers, I bought corn on discount with small but harmless worms in it, and I learned about food.

At one point I was buying 100% local and almost joined the local co-op. I made all sorts of food — italian, Greek, Mediterranean, Southern in the summer with all of the sweet fruit in season[1], African in the fall with all of the root vegetables available[2]. I even made my own broth from scratch with chicken feet. I baked all sorts of goods from scratch (my favorite being local strawberry brownies).

For dinner I hand made dinner rolls. Watched the dough rise in the kitchen warmed by the oven’s heat, punched it down in the bowl, and kneaded it. I made homemade yogurt from a local farm’s pasteurized milk. My whole eating life was slow….whimsical….comforting and challenging.

Most importantly I learned about good ingredients and how to maintain a good kitchen….what kitchen supplies you absolutely need, and what supplies you can forget or go cheap on. I built up a good spice cabinet.

All of it was terribly fun.

The colors of local food and the quality was unparalleled. I don't have enough time to live as I did those two amazing years presently, but I still use the Yummly app to collect recipes and compile grocery lists so I can shop at the big box store. I still do a few niche things such as make my own vanilla extract and flavored liqueurs, but nothing compared to my hey day.

[1] And not just fruit. Corn too! Summer is my absolute favorite growing season. The colors and tastes of all the fruits and vegetables is what I crave all year. I’ve always wanted to make this: Sweet Corn Ice Cream With Blackberry Verbena Sauce Recipe …never got around to buying an ice cream machine or doing it the old-fashioned, freeze & scrape from the cookie sheet way as my freezer width changed drastically when I moved. :(

[2] If anybody has a good root vegetable dish, please send it my way! I’ve only done stews, and I could never get a hold of any good oxtail, so they’ve come out quite disappointingly. Any other permutations would be welcomed!

[3] Also, totally unrelated, but if anybody has a garam masala recipe you’d be kind enough to share…I’ve been trying to crack my local Indian place’s recipe for a few months. I think they do Southern (edit: NORTHERN..ty for the PM/correction) Indian food.

My mother, in trying to emulate her parents near 40-year marriage, made 5 serious attempts at marriage. Two ironies existed in this effort—-one, that her parents had a very dysfunctional marriage—-my grandmother though was waiting. She waited and was about to—-then my mother was born 10 years after her last child—-my mother was a “surprise child” so my grandmother had to wait another 16 years and finally, tired of my grandfather’s raging anger, drinking and dysfunction—-raised a wooden hanger to him as he was raging at my mother and threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave. He died a year later.

I offer this to you as my mother’s first fundamental error: her seeking of a cookie-cutter domestic picture that wasn’t to ever completely form. Further, ironically she was not even the kind of woman who wanted the constructs inherent in that structure, she just wanted the structure-picture. But it informed her interest in and true lack of interest in domesticity.

Her second error blossomed, the rejection of domesticity, came from food and cooking. My grandmother could cook. You weren’t exactly excited about my grandmother’s cooking. In order to maintain her health after a 4-way bypass, she treated Dr. Anthony Mayer (I just Googled him, he’s still alive!)—-as her health god. She would wear her good wig and mink coat to go see him once a month until she died.

Dr. Mayer suggested she have a healthier diet in the early 1970s. She died in the 1980s not using seasoning beyond salt and pepper—-in moderation. Ever. My grandmother literally beat into maids and attendants how to make food tasteless or blander. No onions, no green peppers, nothing but whatever the vegetable was, the meat was. Simple boil, fry, bake and chew.

My mother, rebelling against this gastronomic inanity by 16 was going to French restaurants with her gal pals; trying all kinds of Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Asian food possible. Italian (her favorite was eggplant parmigiana or veal parmigiana), Russian, you name it. When I was born in her 20s, my mother understood the technicalities of cooking but she really, expertly knew how to make…reservations.

I was born and her and my father split and she found Stan, Husband #1. Stan is an interesting story but only lasted a few years, I was a toddler when they broke up. Then she waited a few years and there came Terry, Husband # 2 (and technically #4 1/2).

And he was a chef. Like big-time private restaurants, country club, superstar chef. Who was crazy. But he could cook.

I remember one time standing in the huge kitchen on the first floor of the duplex apartment we’d moved into—-looking for something for lunch. I was maybe 9. I asked him for some cash for Chinese food. He said no. Then he opened the refrigerator, looked at it, then took out a pan/wok and went to town. He would tell me to hand him an ingredient and he proceeded to make Fried Rice from scratch (with egg) in front of me! He blew my mind. It was delicious.

My mother, however…could make reservations. She could basically cook. She would make Thanksgiving dinner and every once in awhile dinner or two. But mainly she would make reservations.

After she got rid of Terry, I missed food. Food that didn’t involve waiters, menus and huge leather seats. She would have me, between 6 and 10 years old, get on the subway and meet her at her office, across from the World Trade Center, and we’d go out to restaurants. Or when she got home she’d hand me the cash for veal parmigiana or lobster Cantonese and eventually she would just leave the cash and I’d have it by 6 pm on the table.

Then I asked could I cook?

The deal was I could only cook things that she or my grandmother had supervised me learning to make.

My biggest confusion was fried chicken. I would defrost the chicken, put the oil in the pan and then put in the chicken. Tada!!!!! Not fried chicken. :(

(Flour! That took a couple of years to understand. lol)

My other challenge, in the beginning, was…….rice. Plain, white rice.

But by about 10 I was good enough from her instruction, my grandmother’s and Terry’s, to cook pretty much anything. He would stock the fridge with 20–30 T Bone steaks and I’d have them for lunch when I got home from school. Or lobsters. Or bags of shrimp. It was like living inside of Peter Luger’s restaurant for years. Oh, there were still reservations made but my mother finally acknowledged my plea for home-cooking…if I did it.

Then my father, Husband # 3, and my mother decided to get back together. In the year before their legal marriage, we would visit him, in the Big House, and my mother, enthralled by the 2nd Love of Her Life, the first had died at 16, went batshit cook crazy. I didn’t know she had these skills. She would make him croissants—-from scratch. Bread and pastries and cakes and delicious meals. I watched her in awe—-she’d always had the power. And never used it! lol

He got out and she went farther—-waist-deep into Islam, wearing a hijab, cooking only Hallah foods, banning non-Hallah foods (there’s actually a neatly typed list that’s updated every year by Mosques of what food has pork products in it.)

When she decided it was time to end that marriage, she sat me down at one of the big leather banquette restaurants in downtown Manhattan—-I think it was Bobby Vans—-I was perusing my menu. She set down hers, turned to the waiter and said she would be having the baby back ribs—-what would I be having?

Yeah, she threw down a spare rib gauntlet—-the BBQ leveled discussion was which parent did I want to live with?

I had the ribs.

From then on she would simply leave the cash and a request or two—-she loved Entennman’s Golden Fudge cake (in recent years they have changed the recipe so it no longer tastes like it used to—-it is sad that I know this)—-we used to have rolling, tear laden, yelling and screaming fights over that cake—-but I was still in charge of weekly grocery shopping and cooking at 12. She'd bring home the bacon….

At 18, with my first credit cards, from working part-time in sales, I went to D’Agostino’s supermarket where I had been fired for proving the computer tally was wrong in calling my cash draw short (actually a manager had swiped $50) and I bought $200 worth of groceries!!! BWAHAHAHAHHA!

Yes, that was my revenge upon D’Ag—-to return with credit cards and a year later I had! My mother just shook her head at my teenage insanity and enjoyed the lobster and Golden Fudge cake.

For years, even after my mother and grandmother combined households in her last couple of years, I was the main shopper. The challenge for me was food my grandmother would eat—-sugar-free, healthy, not as abundant as it is now. I learned how to cook, bake, fry, grill everything in a near hospital healthy way and be able to zuzz it up for us.

Husband # 4, Jesse, who swept in when my mother tried to get back with Terry, and it failed, (my father #3, Terry #2 & #4 1/2 and Jesse # 4 sort of overlapped-mushed together within about 3–4 years as my mother left one, used the other for his car and money to escape one, returned the car and moved into a new apartment with the second, the building superintended by the third. Got it? Good.)—-no, he literally swept in—he was the building’s superintendent, was amazed when we went to a seafood restaurant one night.

We’re all surveying menus—-I was 14— and he says to me how special I should feel that my parents allow me to order from the menu. My mother and I stare at him—-like he was new—-or poor—-and laugh incredulously. I order a starter of clams on the half shell, raw, to be followed by a steamed lobster with a side sirloin and creme brulee for dessert.

Jesse only lasted a year. (After half a dozen years of 3 in a row strikes, she decided to take a break altogether.) Ironically enough my mother explained when they were over in our secret food fest: Wendy’s parking lot, in the first car she ever bought on her own, a ginormous Lincoln Continental. Before that, she was the car rental queen for the weekends. Memories….

Biting into a triple burger with everything, my mother says to me: “No matter how good the sex is, it’s not a reason to get married nor stay with someone.”

I finished chewing and thanked her for the timing of her bon mot.

Her other graphic bon mot which she said she’d overlooked about Jesse, financially, was her golden rule—-”Always fuck up, never fuck down.”

(She would deeply flounce this rule when she bought Husband #5, out of loneliness.)

My allowance eventually, in a protracted negotiation, became attached to my domestic skills—the house was spotless, meals prepped, snacks ready, pantry stocked and me experimenting on some new recipe at 16.

• 8 layers, multicolored layered buttercream cakes.
• Handmade graham crust, dough crust pies—-cherry, apple, pumpkin, blueberry, cobbler, etc..
• Chicken—-BBQ, fried, baked, stews, soups, coq au vin, grilled, etc.
• Beef—steaks, stews, roasts, on and on.
• Pork—roasts, stews, grilled, skewered.
• Fish, shrimp, lobster—-she would often beg me to make my scampi during her terminal time and for Thanksgiving she wanted me to cook ribs, vegetables, candied yams—-by the end she would only eat my cooking. lol

Lobster Cantonese, Home Style

Today, 2019, I stroll through the Grand Central Station market and the fresh seafood counter attendants know me well, and I stare at the lobster deal—-3 for $50—-and I think to myself I could go to my local Chinese joint—-get 3–4 lobster sauce bowls/orders (mainly broth, egg whites, and lobster roe—-or pork—-real spots use roe, most CHinese restaurants use pork bits for Lobster sauce), get those 3 bad boys and make a serious Lobster Cantonese. Then I remember only my mother, who could cook, but wouldn’t, didn’t, often refused to, would appreciate it.

Now her reticence and often food demands of technique, skill, ability, and timing sounds a little rough around the edges but by 26, I was the bistro chef/Sunday chef at Swathmore’s private bistro—-for kicks, for a semester while working in Philadelphia.

No Liquor In My Cooking

I learned my mass cooking skills—-75+ people when my mother volunteered to cook for an AA Easter bash…and promptly came home with the cash, handed it to me and said she needed dinner for 100 people that included several food varieties, beverages, vegetables, and desserts. By the weekend. It was like Tuesday.

Gauntlet dropped. Challenge accepted, Old Woman.

I went to the butcher—-who of course knew this odd little 16-year-old who did the weekly shopping and ordered three 45lb boxes of chicken wings. I had my green grocer lined up and then the supermarket for seasonings, fixings and pie/cake ingredients.

I made:

• 2 pans each of Teriyaki, BBQ and Fried chicken wings
• Pan of mixed greens (I always do kale, collards, mustard, turnip and spinach in a blonde roux—-chicken broth, seasonings, flour with a turkey or ham hock or neck meat until it breaks down, remove bones—it’s like a hearty green stew, It will polish your colon clean.)
• My EIGHT cheese baked macaroni—I only do it once every few years because it’s basically a heart attack on a plate. I got the original recipe from Patti LaBelle’s 7 cheese cookbook recipe.
• Rice (White—I finally mastered it but a funny aside I got into a HUGE fight with my first live-in boyfriend when we were cooking together and I couldn't tell him, after having cooked it for 20 years, how you “know” how much rice to water to put in the pan. He thought I was being a smart ass. But my parents had hammered home so many skills—that I had it at automaticity then and couldn’t articulate how to cook. This is why though there have been many requests, I have yet to do cooking segments on my TV show! lol)
• Corn on the cob in a butter sauce
• Fresh garden salad
• Various pies and such.

Easter Sunday—-4pm we schlep all these pans and pans of food over to the hall—-ironically 2 blocks away above the butcher and greengrocer stores in Brooklyn— set up the heating Sterno and over a hundred people show up. My mother and I are standing behind the tables ladling out food and the folk are raving and ooohing and aaahing and someone actually says how much work this must’ve been but everything is cooked perfectly.

And my mother, not missing a beat says: “I was up all night cooking. Thank you.”

I turn and she gives me the look—-Later she paid me extra hush money to keep my mouth shut about who really did the cooking.

Enjoying My Cooking

Over the years eventually my grandmother, my mother, aunts, boyfriends, girlfriends, friends, associates would only eat my food. I’ve had dinner parties for 4 to 50 people at a time, cooking the whole thing.

As a Youth Coordinator & Adult Male group coordinator, I’ve had to provide a repast at the end of a 2–3-hour workshop and I can make nearly anything with a microwave and some Sterno, for 20–75 men at a time.

(When my mother and I bought our first co-op at 17 for some reason the brand new oven cable line was broken so it took a month to get the replacement—-my mother turned to me and tasked me, with cash, to ensure nutritious good food and dinners were present and cooked every night—-with just the microwave. To this day, at work cafeteria sites people are amazed what I can prep at home and microwave at work. Or better yet microwave at work—-full circle: rice. Parboiled rice comes out perfectly in the microwave.)

For one of the great facilitators’ birthday, I made 3 kinds of lobster (buttery baked, Fra Daviola, herb & butter), rib-eye steaks, two kinds of Spanish rice and ordered several buttercream cakes from this joint Wimps in Harlem (Wimps had the bomb cakes!), beverages, etc for 50 men.

Normally for the adult men, I would do chicken dishes with rice and a vegetable and beverages.

For the youth, I would do the same but include snacks, chips, cake.

Then I was corralled onto the board of another men’s group ostensibly for my business and teaching experience but I actually preferred doing the cooking for the end of the meeting for 40–50 men. Multiple types of pasta, bolognese sauces, arribbatas, sausages, chicken, beef, pork roasts, turkey, chicken—-I honestly stayed the 2nd year because I enjoyed cooking so much for 3 solid hours, by myself, on a Fridays—-it was at the beginning of my Columbia work/school time and I’d promised myself I would buy prepped meals and go to restaurants instead of cooking, ending any drama with my new roommate about the kitchen/cleaning.

Friday became a relaxation of cooking once a week. They never realized that plastic smile on my face when guys would come into the kitchen was really: “Please leave. I’m having fun without your company/chatter.”

What Was the Question? lol

In sum, I realized my mother couldn’t cook when I realized that I can cook practically anything because of her….reticence, resistance, annoyance, at cooking. She could cook, she simply preferred not to. Not like in a cold way but I think she didn’t care for the mechanics of it. She preferred to run businesses, deal with people and then to do fashion design and teach models how to properly walk in her clothing designs.

But that gave me years of learning how to cook well and then eventually if I ever wanted to, a job skill. I have a secret job desire to be a short-order cook for a little while—-I worked at Wendy’s on the grill in high school—-that was a thrill; and then the Swarthmore bistro, and then massive dinner parties (my best one was 12 people from 4 states away on a Saturday where I tried out a beef roast recipe and then 4 people who couldn’t make it Saturday, came over on Sunday for a beef stew from the leftover beef; my second best was a dozen folk and buying a massive amount of salad fixings and BBQ roast pork strips from the Chinese restaurant and creating this hearty salad that had these beautiful ruby strips of meat) and cooking for agencies/work.

But on a deeply personal developmental level I can not only take care of myself domestically (cooking, cleaning, laundry, sewing—-I actually find them all relaxing)—-yes, I make fantastic meals for myself—-but also I can give, share, nurture, comfort others with well-made food. A warm home.

I like having this skill. I like thinking about one day cooking for my own family and mate, giving to them whatever it is that they like and nourishes them and most importantly, no matter how much I enjoy the art of cooking—-knowing how to make reservations.

I Made A Reservation Last Week, She Would’ve Been Proud

I went to Chateau of Spain in NJ a couple of weeks ago and had the octopus, mussels diablo and seafood paella—-it was amazing! I’m trying to be cool and not go back as much as I want to or just order it for takeout. But I’d seen it from the outside and then went and it has linen table cloths (as mother demanded, set a standard for), excellent wait and hosting staff, full and proper dinner set up of silver, flat and glassware and delicious food.

When she lay dying and she would request things—-I catered a whole dinner from Morton’s for her and Husband # 5 into the hospital room; the Thanksgiving rib special; lobster and shrimp of course—-it gave me a sad pride that I could create elegant dinners and treats for her—-though she’d misused food over the years to get to a point of bad health/diabetes/heart disease.

She gave me that, my mother, the ability to create AND appreciate a good restaurant and food.

#KylePhoenix

#TheKylePhoenixShow

I used to cook omelets like this for my daughter:

Super tiny little chopped cucumber, spinach, and MUSHROOMs (which are considered to be the biggest enemy by my daughter and the healthiest by me) are secretly wrapped up in the gorgeous egg skin together with fried rice, and then of course that omnipotent ketchup!

Isn’t it cute, healthy and child-friendly?

Am I smart?

My daughter, 4 years old then, happily ran to my master piece, taking a big spoon…

The spoon stopped on its way.

“It SMELLS like MUSHROOM.”

…

Her calm voice continued, “I like the omelet grandma made.”

She always knew her mom was a bad cook.

^^

(Image from internet)

When I got my first taste of good, old-fashioned institutional food. Cheerleading camp, at age 16, which was held for a week on a college campus. The camp shared the cafeteria with the cheerleaders, and the food was run of the mill institutional. And I couldn’t get enough of:

• Vegetables that were green, not grey. (As a weight-conscious teen, I used to eat vegetables all the time, even though I couldn’t stand them, or so I thought.) I actually didn’t even recognize zucchini as the same vegetable, it looked and tasted so different.
• Bread that didn’t have that whiff of mold. (My parents didn’t make bread, but they bought it on sale and were loath to throw it away before it was consumed.)
• Tabasco sauce that wasn’t brown. (They never, ever, ever, to this day, throw away condiments.)
• Meat that actually was seasoned and salted. (My mom doesn’t believe in tasting food as she cooks, because calories, and doesn’t add salt ever because heart disease. And the “never throw away condiments” rule applied to most seasonings, too.)
• Cookies, cakes and pies that weren’t rock-hard. (Whole wheat flour and additions like brewers yeast are tricky for the amateur cook, especially one who doesn’t taste anything.)
• Milk that wasn’t slightly curdled or off-tasting.
• Unlimited portions. Food, at least the expensive or edible stuff, was always doled out in tiny portions in our house. (We had six people in the family, and for some reason, a stingy food budget. My parents had an entire basement they kept locked, where they stored the freshly-purchased stuff, and in it a locked cabinet where they stored the even more desirable stuff like peanut butter and chocolate chips.)

I must have gained five pounds that week. I couldn’t believe food could be so consistently good. All while my campmates were complaining that they missed their home-cooked meals. Ha!

I was actually happy to get away from the camp kitchen. I was already worried about my weight and I realized if I was able to eat like this all the time, I’d get too fat for my tastes.

Writing this now, it occurs to me that it may not have been a case of my parents being bad cooks, so much as they were overly restrictive about food. They are still this way, still have the locked cabinet even though their youngest child is 44 years old, and they still have the same exact same condiments they had in the 1980s.

I also realize that this food restrictions may have had something to do with my relationship with food. As an adult, I’m also prone to buying expired products (at reduced prices) and forcing myself to eat not-so-palatable foods rather than throw them away. (I won’t eat moldy tasting stuff, however, but I sometimes drink iffy milk.)

I knew as far back as I can remember that my mum, with the exception of scones, could not cook. The impression I get is that my grandma, who is a fantastic and, for someone pushing 90, pretty adventurous cook, dominated the kitchen in such a way that my mum was never actually taught to cook. After she moved out, she lived in the nurses home at the hospital, which was catered, and then she moved in with my dad, whose mother DID teach him to cook. He cooked from day one, and was always the person to put food in front of us.

My brother and I had been constantly motivated to help cook\/cook dishes the family members, but wasn't until I happened to be about 16, and started getting a little more into food and adventurous with preparing that we realised that in reality my father isn't the cook I always think he was either. He sometimes count on countless pre-prepared things (e.g. aunt Bessie's roast potatoes, which are entirely disgusting, packet sauces etc). I also realised just how much fat and sodium goes into their cooking, besides the level of stodge. When he really attempts, he cooks well, but laziness is their downfall.

Whenever I went round other people's houses I always did notice that sometimes the food was better but the real time I noticed they were bad cooks is when I started cooking.

I suddenly realised how bland their food was :D

My parents a very British and can't cook a decent tasting meal to save their life and don't get me started on the non-existent seasoning. The most popular dish my mother cooked was sausages and mash - a simple dish that can be tasty if done right.

It's not even a hard dish to spice up, which is a staple of my mother's cooking really. She just cooks the raw ingredients and slaps them on your plate without adding to them - I told her I have a whole spice rack and it wouldn't hurt to put some butter or milk in the mash or season your food with salt and pepper. Her food is also drier than the Sahara desert, she could probably make gravy dry.

So now I cook for myself because if you want it done right you do it yourself!

I take good care to cook a variety of veggies for me and baby and try new things. I've even tried different dishes from around the world. I make my own curries and asian food quite well too.

I learned some good cooking tips off the TV which really enhanced my cooking.

I especially love the tip about boiling in just enough water to retain the flavour - don't have it swimming in water. This was phenomenal because now my veggies taste incredibly flavourful.

I also season, even if just a little bit to spice up dishes. Keep onion, garlic and ginger handy and I have expanded my spice collection, I'm nearing like 50 spices now, perhaps a bit excessive but you never know when you need that Galangal or Saffron...

It might happen :D

The best spice I ever used to spice up food was Asafoetida, that stuff works charms in spice cooking. One thing my mum did decide to pick up from me though was the simple use of sauces in cooking - even pre-made ones like Hollandaise, Hoisin, Worcester can make food more interesting! Even peanut butter is nice in cooked food.

When I realized that eating a healthy, nutritional, balanced meal and eating a satisfying, tasty meal are not contradictory. I had mistakenly assumed a false dilemma that the only tasty food was empty and satisfying calories of junk food. I realized that it is indeed possible to have it both ways, but it comes at a price. You have to invest more time and money. Eating is compromising and balancing your priorities - you can't have a meal that is cheap, quick, tasty yet nutritious. But until I dabbled with cooking myself when I left my parents' place, I hadn't realized I had a choice. I hadn't realized I can sacrifice time and money to eat better. It's a matter of ranking your own priorities, and I found that good food is worth the effort of preparation to me. My parents have different priorities, and I had assumed their approach to food was universal a long time, because fish don't know they're in water.

My mother is very health-conscious and I grew up with messages how important balanced, nutritional meals are. I did not particularly like the nutritional meals she served me, however, because my mother is extremely impatient and has a very practical, efficient and economic approach to everything she does. She is extremely active and extrovert, she has a gazillion hobbies and she is friends with the whole town, and engaged in politics, and has a successful career, and during my teenage years random adults would come up to me and tell me how much they admired her and her enthusiastic spirit and her sharp-witted mind (and I'd wonder how the fuck they knew my mother, but after a while I'd just shrug and accept she had a finger in every pie). The downside is, if you're busy with so many activities, you spend less attention on the individual things you do, especially if it's just a tedious chore. My mother is not very perfectionist, she isn't the type who takes a long time to ponder over decisions, she's not very thoughtful and reflected, she does not perform any task in a really dedicated, thorough, careful way, and she doesn't do more than what is necessary. She never rests. She is focussed on "getting things done", and she won't waste her time on aesthetics or enjoyment or any unnecessary things. Her accomplishments must be practical and productive.

My mother never enjoyed being a homemaker, she enjoys being where all the action is way too much, she wants to make important decisions, she wants responsibility, she wants to contribute her skills and experience to society. Nevertheless, she had three children, and sexist double standards in society shoved the responsibility of being a caregiver and a homemaker onto her. So she did perform household chores, and she never neglected her children, but she did them in a rushed way. For instance, she'd go grocery shopping and she'd bring only half of what she intended to buy because if she didn't find an item at first sight she'd lack the patience to browse the shelves and look for it or ask the staff.

So she did cook, but she cooked because she needed to get food on the table, and nothing more. She didn't serve any fast food because she valued health too much. She'd serve ingredients that make up a balanced meal, according to the food pyramid. But she'd prepare them in a way that made them just barely edible - anything else would have been an unnecessary effort. She served mostly bland, overcooked vegetables - and as I'm very picky with texture and I hate the slimy texture many overcooked vegetables have, I concluded I didn't like vegetables when it was mostly an issue of preperation methods. She didn't use any spices or seasonings or sauces or anything to spice up the food. She didn't experiment with food, she never tried any new recipes or new ingredients.

My father, in contrast, is the opposite of my mother. He is less active and introvert, and has just a few hobbies he's very dedicated to. He is patient, thoughtful and reflected and takes his time to improve things and to consider decisions ... or in my mother's words, "too slow" and "doesn't get things done". (I disagree and I fully take after my father.) He enjoys cooking, and he has no problem cooking more elaborate and more time-consuming meals. He can spend two hours in the kitchen, and the mere thought of that drives my mother crazy.

But he wasn't expected to be a homemaker, he worked longer hours than my mother, and his cooking was restricted to weekends when he had some spare time. He cooked as a leisure, not to get food on the table, whereas my mother cooked every day just for practical reasons. My father is a quality cook, my mother is a quantity cook.

So I did eat some tasty meals at weekends. However, I wasn't introduced to the variety of tasty meals until I took an interest in cooking myself, because although my father enjoys cooking, he's not interested in experimenting and learning. He knows a few recipes he learned from his mother, and he makes them over and over again. He has some good cooking skills, but they are mostly centered around the same few core ingredients of traditional German cuisine.

In hindsight, I think that instead of resorting to junk food as a teenager just to eat something else than what my mother cooked, I should have taken an interest in cooking and learned some good recipes much earlier. I should have taken over the entire responsibility to bring food on the table in my family, and I should have bought the groceries and cooked meals for everyone myself. I don't know if my parents would have trusted me and granted me that autonomy to the degree of giving me so much control over the household budget, but I should have tried and convinced them to let me cook. As far as my mother is concerned, her disapproval of elaborate and time-consuming meals is a time issue more than a money issue. She would be willing to spend more money on ingredients if it wasn't for all the work that goes into preparing them. If I had offered to do all the work, I could have served food according to my priorities instead of hers.

My mom isn't exactly a bad cook, I actually love most of her cooking. She just overcooks red meat. I didn't realize it until I ate a steak made by my husband's mom and dad around 20 years old. I didn't really care for steak, they were always tough, salty and eh. My stepdad also had a thing about not allowing steak sauce because “good steak doesn't need sauce". The first steak they made for me was around an inch and a half thick, as big as my plate, rare, seasoned with more than salt and it cut like butter. I was tiny and didn't eat much but I put a hurting on that steak. It truly didn't need sauce! I also realized soon after that my experiences with food was extremely limited to deep fried southern comfort food and irish dishes.

They aren't.

My dad is a terrible cook. He's in love with the Canadian steaks he ate when he lived in Canada and tried to make us fall in love with his steaks when we were younger.

He was bad at cooking and always was and I never learned to love steak.

My mom on the other hand is a phenomenon. My friends and my brother's friends all give rave reviews of her food when they come over. She taught me everything I know about cooking. Good cooking frankly comes from a lifetime of experience eating good food. If you don't eat good food, you don't develop your sense of taste. It is impossible for you to become a good cook.

Its sort of like an artist or a writer.

An artist cannot become a good artist without being exposed to good art. You just don't get the opportunity to refine your sense of aesthetics. Likewise a writer can't become a good writer without reading a lot of good books and stories. There's just no way you learn what's actually great and what isn't. There will be some exceptional geniuses here and there who defy that. But those people are like once a generation talents, if even that.

Cooking is actually an art. It isn't a science. You can take a recipe and try to recreate it. But various things will be out of your control in the variable settings of life. Ingredients are not the same as the ones used in the recipe. Not all ingredients are equal. Your oven might heat up differently from the recipe maker's oven.

It is not a precise science. It is an art. And it is your sense of aesthetics that will lead you to make the minute corrections you need to do to fix the recipe for your personal use, taking into account the differences in your culinary circumstance from that of the recipe maker.

A scientist would be lost doing this. An artist would be like a fish to water.

My mom was one such artist and in raising me with a lifetime of good food, imparted to me the sense of aesthetics I needed to become a good cook.

My parents are both really good cooks, save the odd recipe that went wrong (my mom’s attempt at something called “Chuckwagon Pie” that the dog buried in the compost after refusing to eat).

My mom had a hard path ahead of her, because my dad’s mom, raised in a family of 11, was not allowed to cook. She was considered the “sickly” one, because back before World War I, she was the one kid who wasn’t obese (she was never sick; just not fat). Back before antibiotics, kids needed to have some weight on their bones in order to survive childhood illnesses. But she never got sick and never needed the excess weight.

So cooking fell to her 4 sisters and mom. She learned to garden and sew and went to college instead.

So my dad grew up in a household where he was served grilled bologna almost daily. He often ate across the street at his aunt’s house (married to one of the brothers). He learned how to make chocolate chip cookies before he was 6, because my grandma was a teacher and then later helped run the family business.

Besides the fried bologna, her big specialty was “pressed chicken”, and then cream puffs. The cream puffs were amazing: worthy of a pastry chef.

The pressed chicken I had once when she was trying to interest me in cooking. It killed my interest. It had two ingredients: a whole chicken and plain gelatin. No salt, no spices. Just a baked chicken, pressed flat, surrounded in flavorless gelatin. It was a work of visual art. It was too boring to eat.

One Easter, she called my mom to ask how to bake a ham. She was widowed when my dad, her youngest, was 18 and at college. There were TV dinners. She ate TV dinners and learned to make pasta, salad and baked ham and pot roast. She loved helping my mom in the kitchen, although she would rarely need to cook any of the dishes for herself.

So my dad actually considered marrying my mom because when he visited her parents, her mom was a terrific cook (that whole side of the family is, just as everyone in my dad’s family is except my grandma!) and he saw that my mom could cook, too. He was so over fried bologna.

But my mom had a hard row to hoe: my dad was so happy to eat anything that wasn’t fried bologna, but he really wanted meat and potatoes every night. Steak and baked potatoes. Roast and baked potatoes. Baked chicken and mashed potatoes. Every. Single. Night. My mom is a whiz in the kitchen, but she was getting unbelievably bored cooking the same maybe 8 dishes over and over again. His mom never used spices or herbs, except for onions and salt and pepper. Anything else threw him.

But slowly, she started introducing new things. His mom’s sister taught my mom to make something they called “Snitz und Knepp”, which was sausages and apples with sauerkraut. He’d never eaten it, but my grandma had while growing up. So it was heritage, so he tried it. That meal was the highlight of my 4th year, culinarily speaking. That, and his friend who brought us some venison. He tried that, too.

Then he had pizza for the first time and liked it so much he remodeled the soda fountain/diner side of his drug store to make it a pizza place. And we started having really good spaghetti at home, and pizza.

Then they decided to throw a Christmas party for their employees, and my mom talked him into buying her the Time-Life International Cookbook. She experimented with recipes for a month, and everyone was raving over her Swedish meatballs to the point where my dad asked for them once in awhile. But we still hadn’t moved too far from meat and potatoes (except my mom insisted on a veggie, which he wanted overcooked, and a salad, which he wanted to be packed with all kinds of things).

Gradually, she brought him around: they joined a Cheeses of the World Club, and we got to try things no grocery in the 70s stocked outside of New York or LA: Havarti, Jarlsburg, Fontina, Lancaster. That led to trying all kinds of sausages, and then to Chinese food (which had just come out in cans all over America). Eventually my mom learned to make Americanized Chinese and Japanese food from scratch. And then our church helped a Vietnamese family settle, and we got to try some pretty amazing Vietnamese food. My dad was really stretched.

Still, besides the one Chuckwagon Pie disaster and a birthday cake the other dog buried after no one, human or otherwise, would eat, there was one dish she just couldn’t seem to make:

Chili.

She’d first read about it but never tasted it, living where we did in a small town in rural Indiana. She’d not even seen a recipe. She just knew it had hamburger, beans, tomatoes, onions, and chili powder.

But at that point, my dad wouldn’t do anything other than salt, pepper and onions.

So she tried to fool him by putting in about 1/4 tsp. for the entire 12 quart pot. And they were trying to eat healthy, so no salt, either. And then, they had a huge garden, so she added all kinds of vegetables from zucchini to sweet peppers to carrots to celery. It was almost like V-8 soup.

My dad tried actual chili at the first Wendy’s we’d ever been to, on vacation. He thought it was horribly hot and spicy.

I was forced to eat it until I was in high school. It was just incredibly bland. Finally my mom allowed me to make myself a peanut butter sandwich on nights she served it. And she learned not to make quite as much.

And then my college roommate, who started me down the path as a foodie as an adult, made me her chili when I was about 25 or so. I was amazed! THIS is what people were raving about. I was blown away. I learned to make excellent chili and made some for my parents once while I was visiting them. My mom loved it. My dad thought it was ok—he’d matured a bit in his tastes. My mom now makes it the way I do.

But I don’t make it anymore. My husband developed his own contest-winning recipe.

As a teenager. By then, I had noticed that everything I had at someone else’s house tasted really great. Of course, that is a typical teen reaction to something novel.

There were a few factors involved. We weren’t rich, we lived in a very small town, this was before the Internet, and Shake and Bake chicken was considered good.

We had goulash, which was elbow macaroni, Ragu, and a pound of hamburger at least 3 nights a week.

Even worse was when the goulash would be frozen, and taken out a month later infused with that freezer aroma . To this day, I refuse to freeze leftovers. God awful.

My mother had different tastes. She liked chuck roast. I think it is too fatty. I use top round instead.

She would make a salad with a lot of celery and radish. Not for me.

She also liked instant coffee. haha.

We never had a whole roast chicken, for example. When we had so-called pork chops, I wanted to run away. A horrible scrap of nasty meat, with 2 bites at most.

I think she just didn’t know. This is how she grew up eating.

We didn’t keep garlic in the house, or many other spices.

But when us was flush for somewhat, we'd steak a great deal.

i actually do miss the woman macaroni salad.

we seriously miss this lady.

Friendsgiving.

Thanksgiving had always been a massive affair at my house growing up — my parents would wake up at like 3 in the goddamn morning to start slow roasting the turkey and ironing a tablecloth the size of a football field.

I had always been brainwashed to assume that if a dinner table has more than one fork, that’s an indicator of quality. I also assumed turkey was supposed to be dry and flavorless, and the ritual bird I had been eating annually had in fact been the optimal iteration of it.

Not so.

Fast forward to some November Tuesday in college years ago. One of my friends had made a meal for a small group (maybe 6–8.) The turkey was incredible. I mean, juicy, flavorful, perfect. I was stunned. “How did you make this turkey? What’s your secret?????”

“I followed… the directions… on the package…?”

Apparently if you cook a turkey for less than 8 hours, it comes out less dry.

My mom is an excellent cook. Everything she makes is delicious.

My dad makes about five different things. They all taste bland at best. His roasts are dry lumps, his potatoes are mush on one side and burnt on the other. He cooks cooked shrimp. Think about that for a minute. His approach to dry pasta is to soak the noodles and slowly bring them to a boil, then let them boil for over an hour. It's like eating sludge.

His grilling is generally OK. He can grill a steak. Chicken is a bit scary, and often came off raw in the middle.

He is afraid of trying anything he doesn't know already. He makes racist remarks about any kind of Asian food, to the point that he won't even eat rice. He won't buy fresh vegetables, only canned corn that gets microwaved.

I don't know when I really knew he was a lousy cook. I know that learning a little about cooking makes his more unappetizing.

I think was before I got married. I wanted to cook and learn more and it was necessary—because I was a young person on my own caring for my younger sibling. Every time, visiting someone’s house for dinner, there was always some new dish that was wonderful or an familiar one cooked in a much better way.

Back in the 1970s, my mom was a single parent with two jobs. She was always short on time, so nearly everything was store-bought cans. Canned spinach; canned peas; canned carrots and peas; canned lima beans; and, oh God, as a “treat” we had canned asparagus. Suffice to say I didn’t like many vegs back then. Sandwiches were Wonder bread and slices of American processed “cheese.” I actually dreaded sandwiches by that point. Dinner was usually Hamburger Helper. So I think most of it was time and the era she grew up up, because when she could spend some time cooking she made a great chuck steak or Swedish meatballs.

Her mother grew up in Britain and they always overcooked meat and underseasoned. The leg of lamb we had every Easter was always overdone with just that sweet, bright green mint jelly stuff. I genuinely believed, as a kid, that because Jesus suffered, that’s why we were eating this terrible stuff.

Her mince pie? Not a hint of spices or dried fruit. She prided herself on making everything from scratch including the pastry. The meat filling? She literally boiled ground beef with an onion and added salt and pepper. That was the filling.

So, fast forward a few years when was I cooking for my sibling and me: a French co-worker invited me to dinner and cooked rare lamb spiked with fresh garlic and fresh rosemary. Fresh asparagus cooked just enough draped in Hollandaise sauce. And it was so artful looking.

I was absolutely transformed.

My mother is a really bad cook….

For a background, I grew up with my four elder and a younger sister in a very conservative household. My mother was running a boot camp to convert all her girls into ‘good housewives’ who would keep her ‘naak Oonchi’ (pride upheld) for rest to her life. My eldest sister is 17years and second is 9years older to me, so one can understand the fabric of our relationship. They both had significant age-gap and hence have strained-tensed relationship amongst themselves. All my childhood, I have seen my eldest sister preparing breakfast and sending us to school. For lunch we would have Daal-bhaat, almost everyday. That was something my mom prepared and trust me, Daal was never enough for all 7 (6 of us and our mom) and we never had anything to find fault in anything because that Daal used to be just a runny liquid with some lentils occasionally found in it. Even that runny water with salt and spice was never sufficient to mix with rice. Thank God!! Didi used to cook dinner….

In 1991, my sister got married and then the worst nightmare of our lives started. My mother coerced my second sister who was still in class 9th to prepare breakfast for all of us. As much as it was difficult for her to wake-up at 5am and cook breakfast and pack lunchboxes for all 5 of us, prepare tea for parents and boiling milk; it was even more difficult for us to ingest what she used to cook for us. It used to be boiled milk and a single roti (flat-bread). For lunchbox it used to be even pathetic…. 2 roties with a spoonful Bournvita. We used to call that period 4As - Aaloo, Anda, Arbi and Achaar (Potato, Egg, Colocasia, Pickle). She would boil eggs or potatoes or colocasia and would sprinkle salt and turmeric on it. On better days, 4As used to be in our lunchbox. It wasn’t just disappointing but embarrassing too, to open your lunchbox to find 2roties with one boiled egg sprinkled with salt. Trust me, it wasn’t enough ever….

For lunch my mom used to cook same Daal-bhaat almost everyday. On some Sundays, she used to cook Kheer (rice-pudding) without sugar as my father was diabetic. I was so traumatised by this that I still hate (and I mean it) Kheer…. My second sister got married in 2000 and then the torture finally ended…. I took charge of kitchen in 2001 and then my family finally had taste of something else, which they still call tasty. My mother never taught me how to cook and I feel fortunate that she did so because I always cooked with my instincts and it turned out to be good.

Coming to my father, when he got retired from his work, he took over the responsibility of preparing tea for mom and himself as nobody else used to have tea. I loathed the smell and idea of being anywhere near where tea is getting prepared. These days, he mixes all the different kinds of tea (we keep a variety of green teas in our kitchen) with loads of full-fat milk and serve it to mom…. Not just that, when in hotel, he would mix all the tea-bags (Earl Grey, Green Tea and Chamomile Tea) altogether and pour creamer in it, only to serve it my mom. I sometimes guess that he is avenging our childhood trauma eating ‘that something’ my mom used to call food…

My parents are terrible cooks, they had always been. My mom still is really bad at it but she is improving at the age of 75!!! Lol!!

I realized this only years later.

My parents were both amain people, both brough up in harsh environments.

My mom had never learned to cook. She focused her life on her family her friends and trying to run the house. The meals I most commonly remember growing up were Ramen, spaghetti, and various Campbell soups.

Sometimes there were variants. Spaghetti with canned corn, beans and peas all mixed together. This was a family favorite. Because she didn't know how to cook I honestly don't remember ever having steak or chicken. Sometime hamburger helper ground beef but the only meat I can really remember was hotdogs (boiled).

My dad knew how to cook better than my mom, but had long since lost his sense of smell and never had time to cook elaborate meals. He hated the idea of wasting food, so often would just slap leftovers together and heat them up. These meals became the stuff of nightmares and legends. The only time we saw the better side of his cooking was on camping trips when he would cook his meals. But even then I'm not sure if the general misery was just so great that any food was awesome or if it really was that good.

They are both gone now, and I'm all grown up, or at least I'm supposed to be. And despite it all I still make a bowl of Ramen and toast to these wonderful people who taught me their passions, even if it wasn't cooking.

Thanks Mom and Dad.

Probably when, at the age of 10, I got fed up of waiting for people to make me food, and started cooking myself.

It took me another few years to realize that no one had gone to hospital since I took over the kitchen. When we were little my mum, myself, and my sister were in hospital often. Salmonella, gastroenteritis, you name it, one of us has had it. Funnily enough, that stopped when I took charge.

My dad’s a good cook though. Thankfully.

I’m not pretending I’m a great cook, but at least my food isn’t toxic. Recently, when I have the time and I’m only cooking for myself, I’ve experimented with different spices and stuff, and I rather enjoy it. I think I’m improving.