cseggerman Food Journal

(Promoted from the diaries - Kate)

For an introductory post, two recent incidents stuck out in my mind.

I went over to my Mom’s to eat some steak the neighbor kid had given her, because she feared it. I don’t know the circumstance of the donation, but Mom usually eats food as bland as possible and she did not quite trust her neighbor.

It turned out to have a slight spicy marinade, evidenced by the Chile seeds dotting the meat. Onions had once topped it, but Mom had scraped them off. It tasted fine, cooked to about a dead medium, showing just traces of pink. I dug in with a fork and knife, pointing out that it couldn’t be a T-bone and looked like a bone-in ribeye if anything.

I carved Mom a thin piece. She said it was tender. I told her about the different cuts of meat and how my girlfriend liked cooking Tri-tip. The conversation drifted into other dishes I’d eaten at restaurants that I had plans to try recreating, including a sausage and lentil soup.

“You might not like the sausage, but you can have lentils. You know what they are?”

“No. Some kind of vegetable?”

“Beans. They cook up without soaking.”

She looked at me, concerned.

“How do you know all this? You weren’t raised this way. When you were little, I used to open you up a can of SpaghettiOs and you were fine with it.”

On another afternoon, I was showing my Mom’s Mom, my Grandmother, the new issue of Cooks Illustrated, which was almost entirely devoted to soup. When I showed her a recipe for cream of tomato soup, she said “Doesn’t it curdle? What liquid does it have in it?”

I scanned the recipe.

“Tomato juice… heavy cream. Cream would curdle.”

“It seemed to me, on the farm, that you had to add the ingredients in a certain way, or it would curdle.”

“This one’s complicated. They roast the tomatoes first, then sauté some other stuff, then puree it all.”

I read off the rest of the ingredients.

“Well, that’s a little bit richer than we used to have it on the farm.”

My Grandmother grew up on a working farm in Weld County, Colorado, and mentions the cooking that went on or how she used to cook things. She had a battered, ringbound Betty Crocker cookbook that yielded about three or five family favorites.

Neither Mom nor Grandmother cook much anymore. I relate these stories not to portray us as some kind of culinary Eugene O’Neill tragedy, but to show the kind of food culture I came from. Growing up I learned most of my subsistence came from the supermarket, usually in cans or frozen packages. Our favored menus always had “99 Cents” at the top. I didn’t know what fresh spinach looked like until I was past 25. I am a 30 year old white male trying to shake off the sluggish belief that Colonel Sanders will lead the charge of supper for me.

I started teaching myself how to cook because I wanted more than that. Also, I had heard women love a man who can cook, but cooking did not cure my romantic woes. My partner Krista’s family always raves about my cooking, but the pasta e fagioli did not get me Krista. Cooking did cure me of a lot of pickiness, because I found it harder to dislike something I had created.

If this writing carries any special spark, beware it comes from me learning or discovering something new. My enthusiasm does not always indicate quality, as my affair with ramen noodles shows.