I relish the advice of my elders–one aunt in particular. Once a year four generations of women get together for three days of conversation, knitting, and eating. This year it involved a disproportionate amount of chasing toddlers, rather than knitting, but we still sat down to meals together–not just any meal, but a luxurious beef stew, a garlic and feta stuffed chicken, an orange glazed cake. The menu goes on.
I was a self-taught cook—mainly by trial and error. Most cooks learned from an older family member who knew their way around the kitchen blindfolded and had all their treasured recipes in their head (with no quantities, they just knew). My mother will admit that she is not the most enthusiastic cook, and I didn’t live near enough to my grandmothers growing up to learn in that manner like so many women do. My sister wasn’t into it until much later, and so I was pretty much on my own.
I envy that, for my aunt (who learned much of her cooking from my grandmother), putting a delicious home-cooked meal on the table for us is not only an expression of love but also she makes it look effortless. So I asked her what her secrets are.
Make ahead. She takes full advantage of a spare freezer in the garage and pulls out what she needs when she needs it. She made ahead the stuffed chicken breasts so that she didn’t have to spend quite as much time cooking on our weekend together. She baked them on a cookie sheet and they were magically ready at dinnertime (this is the seemingly effortless skill to which I referred). Same for the beef stew and the cake. I’m sure it was hard work for her, but to the untrained eye, she seemed to whip it all up in a matter of an hour.
Avoid tending to something on the stove. I watched her chop a few sweet potatoes and throw them into a crock pot with some butter. She could then set the gadget on high for 6 hours and avoid babysitting a pot. This is one trick I will surely try at home. The mashed sweet potatoes were perfectly creamy and melted in my mouth.
Canning and freezing fresh fruit and vegetables when they are in season. This deserves its own post.
See what I learned in a few short days of watching a more experienced cook? These lessons are invaluable.
My sister, whose husband is half Italian-American, tells me that her mother-in-law is her primary go-to source at holidays. And both of us have been known to call upon our step-mother, who also cooks by heart, for those big-piece-of-meat type dinners.
We always seem to call on those who have trodden the road before us, and they always seem to have the answers–because they learned from the generations before them.
Who do you look to for lessons in cooking?
I know all my faithful readers are wondering what our kitchen looks like now. Well, here it is. Monday morning the guys ripped it down and by 7:30am Tuesday everything was out of there and down to the studs. The rest of this week they've been working on the plumbing and electrical, preparing for tomorrow's drywalling and Monday's cabinet installation. The appliances come tomorrow as well. It's moving along!
