Apron Strings

Submitted by Heather Rosen (who swears her mom’s a good cook now!)

My mother is a great cook now, but when I was grow­ing up in the 1970s she got into veg­e­tar­ian cook­ing in a big way. Now it’s cool to be a veg­e­tar­ian or vegan, and the vari­ety of recipes avail­able is quite incred­i­ble. But dur­ing those early years, my mother exper­i­mented with dishes that all proved to be colos­sal fail­ures – and my poor, dear stom­ach always paid the price.

One evening, when my mother was par­tic­u­larly deter­mined to make some sort of hybrid/alien walnut-and-mystery-veggie loaf (meat­loaf sub­sti­tute), my father said to her: “Okay, if the dog eats it, I’ll eat it.” I laughed, too, and agreed to the same terms and conditions.

When my mother retrieved her prized dish from the oven, the hideous brown brick that was to be our din­ner set off alarm bells. Terry, our beloved and belea­guered Yorkshire Terrier, was about to risk life and limb to be the offi­cial taste tester of this men­ac­ing recipe. My mother put a leaden slice of her cre­ation in some tin foil and clev­erly mixed it up with dry dog food so we could see if it would pass muster with Terry. Terry pounced on the food; my father and I looked at each other, ter­ri­fied. Then some­thing hap­pened. Upon closer scrutiny, we dis­cov­ered that Terry had eaten every­thing BUT the mys­tery loaf. Our lit­tle dog started push­ing the tin foil over the loaf (this actu­ally hap­pened) to cover it up, then shoved the tin foil con­tain­ing the dread veg­gie meal under the mat upon which it had rested.

My father and I were in hys­ter­ics; even the dog wouldn’t eat that!

My mother never cooked veg­e­tar­ian dishes again until the 1990s, when a whole slew of eth­nic, classy and edi­ble non-meat recipes cropped up and we found a way to go meat­less with­out dying. (For the record, I did take two or three bites of the mys­tery loaf, but ended up with a stom­ach ache that night.)

Submitted by Barry Martin

I can clearly link my my pas­sion for food, inter­est in cook­ing, polit­i­cal choices at the grocery/market back to my mother’s cooking.

It was horrible.

I real­ize it’s not easy to put din­ner on the table for 5 kids 7 nights a week, but that food was just plain bad.  I used to qui­etly lament eat­ing chicken what felt like every day. The jig was up for me when I uncov­ered a cook­book on my mother’s shelf called “Chicken Every Day and Every Way” (now, not sur­pris­ingly out of print).

I’ve since learned that:

• Brisket, as it’s braised, should be stringy, ten­der and succulent.
• Chicken wings are rarely eth­i­cally sourced and almost as rarely inter­est­ingly prepared.
• There are more soups out there than (bland) Minestroni, (bland) Pea and (hol­i­day) Chicken.
• Meat sauce that comes in a box is wrong in a lot of ways.

Most impor­tantly, I’ve learned the value of under­stand­ing where your food comes from, that its pro­cure­ment and prepa­ra­tion is a plea­sure, not an incon­ve­nience, the secret ingre­di­ent is always love, and the returns on teach­ing my kids these things are fun and delicious.

This post was sub­mit­ted by the Content Editor of the Fiesta Farms web­site (as well as tal­ented writer, cook, etc) Ivy Knight.

My mother, Rose-Marie, was a hip­pie who spent a lot of time gar­den­ing. Her green thumb and Prince Edward Island’s red soil were a match made in heaven result­ing in flower beds over­flow­ing with blooms and a half-acre gar­den that demanded the whole family’s atten­tion dur­ing the grow­ing sea­son.
“If you weed the onion patch I’ll take you to the beach” she’d tell my brother, sis­ter and I. Weeding that patch took for­ever and by the time we’d fin­ished it would be sup­per­time, too late for the beach. Sitting at the old wooden table sur­rounded by vases filled with glad­i­o­las or peonies and win­dowsills heaped with a revolv­ing cast of ripen­ing green toma­toes, we’d wait sul­lenly for din­ner, our heads filled with regret at another sum­mer day spent in the gar­den instead of out at Panmure Island beach.
Then she’d place a large cut­ting board on the table with a loaf of home­made bread on it and all our sulky thoughts would dis­si­pate. Not just any home­made bread, but the most deli­cious bread ever baked, herb bread.

We were hippy chil­dren used to carob chips, tofu scram­bles and brown rice sur­prise, any­thing that con­tained but­ter or could have but­ter slathered on it made us mental. We were wild for tacos made with Dad’s but­tery thin crepes or steamed broc­coli doused in my sister’s super creamy cheese sauce. Mom’s herb bread was our favourite though, hands down.

She’d fol­low the recipe for French loaf in her lit­tle red kitchen binder. After the req­ui­site first rise, she’d pound it out into a rec­tan­gle. A mix­ture of onions and gar­lic sauteed in but­ter would be laid across the cen­tre. Over this she would put a blended puree of dill, chervil, pars­ley and chives blitzed with olive oil, salt and pep­per. Then she’d roll the whole thing up like a jelly roll, seal­ing the ends and slash­ing the top with a knife before brush­ing the top with some melted but­ter and slid­ing it in the oven.

A slice of that topped with an out­ra­geous amount of but­ter is my great­est food memory.

Thanks Mom.