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.