I'd Rather Cook

Category: Cooking Discussions

• Suspicion and Ketchup – Cooking For Picky Eaters

  Posted at 12:10 pm by Anne Freestone

  Dec 15th

  

  “If I’m a picky eater, Mom, it’s mostly your fault. You didn’t make me eat different things when I was little.” This from my 24 year old son, as I bemoan my even-more-limited-than-usual cooking palette when planning dinner. Sam is at home with us for awhile as he finishes his clinicals in his last year of physical therapy school. I know that he is basically pulling my chain to get a reaction out of me, but I can’t help taking the bait.

  “Hold on there, Chief”, I reply. “There were plenty of things that I liked and served to you, but you refused to even try just because your dad wouldn’t eat them. So don’t go pinning it all on me.” I give my husband Ron a dirty look as I say this, and he just laughs.

  So yes, not only did I marry a picky eater, but I also gave birth to one. Lucky me. Now, I do have some profound dislikes myself, which, fortunately, coincide with my spouse and offspring.

  Stuff we all hate:

  • Peas. Yuck. Nasty little balls of mush. You will never see any of us eating peas, or even worse, pea soup. (Ron and I will do snow peas, but that’s a very different thing).
  • Winter squash. Squishy baby diaper stuff.
  • Blue, roquefort, feta, and all other very strong cheeses. Stinky.
  • Rye or pumpernickel bread. Totally overpowers everything on a sandwich, and not in a good way.
  • Fennel, tarragon, anise or anything that involves a black licorice flavor. No, just no and hell no.

  Stuff Ron and Sam won’t eat:

  • Brocolli
  • Brussel sprouts
  • Mushrooms
  • Lima beans
  • Lamb
  • Liver
  • Pickles or pickled anything
  • Guacamole
  • Pumpkin pie
  • Coconut
  • Tuna

  Stuff Ron won’t eat:

  • Any fruit pie other than apple or key lime
  • Scallops (to be fair, he may have had an alergic reaction to these)
  • Cilantro
  • Raw tomatoes or cooked tomato in large chunks (though he is okay with tomato sauce)
  • Summer squash

  Stuff Sam won’t eat (or won’t try):

  • Any soup other than potato or egg drop
  • Chili
  • Mexican food
  • Creole or Cajun food
  • Lasagna
  • Scalloped potatoes
  • Fruit pies
  • Pecan pie
  • Green salad
  • Chicken salad
  • Potato salad
  • Mustard
  • Snow peas
  • Corned beef (or the hash derived therefrom)

  There lists are not all inclusive, nor are they in any particular order. But, you can see that these preference sheets mean I’m dealing with a fairly limited universe when it comes to getting some variety into the dishes I serve, especially when my son is around.

  My world pretty much revolves around beef, pork and chicken for meats, and green beans and corn for vegetables, supplemented at times with fried peppers and onions. Potatoes are well received, with the exception that Sam won’t eat my fantastic from scratch scalloped potatoes. (His loss.)

  So, in some ways, I have to be more creative than cooks with more options. I have become a master at different ways to dress up corn and green beans. (Although I can never serve my guys green beans al dente, as current fashion dictates – they have to be cooked through, like a limp dishrag, every time. Sigh.)

  And sometimes, when I do try a new dish, despite my careful adherence to said preference lists, it is greeted with suspcious looks and subjected to after-the-fact custom seasonings.

  For example, there was the night I proudly presented Chicken Francaise. Sam peered at the chicken breast pounded thin, fried with its cripsy egg crust and served with a lemon, butter and wine sauce. “What’s this, and what’s in it?”, he queried, his brow furrowed. I explained. He tasted a bite, then walked into the kitchen, and returned with ketchup. I looked at him incredulously. “It’s a chicken tender”, he announced, and proceeded to eat happily.

  I closed my eyes, sighed and thought of that saying about pearls and swine.

  I’ve often wondered about this picky eating thing. Nature or nuture and all that. According to flavor scientists, the aversion to certain tastes seems to be inborn, while an aversion to aromas is learned behavior.  And sometimes, pickiness is modeled on parental behavior.

  So, I would say that our familial hatred of anise flavor is definitely genetic. Ron claims his hate of everything tomato (other than sauce) is linked to being bombarded by non stop fumes as his mother canned tomatoes every summer. (To be fair, the man does have an unusually heightened sense of smell. I didn’t realize how much this can affect how you feel about certain foods until I was pregnant and had a temporarily heightened sense of smell.)

  Sam’s refusal to eat mushrooms is definitely because Ron won’t touch them. Not to mention his dad’s commentary about how he won’t eat fungus or anything that reproduces asexually. (My husband thinks he’s clever.)

  So, I’m pretty much resigned to the restrictions that picky eating has placed on my cooking. If I want mushrooms or brussel sprouts, I make them for myself. As the saying goes, more for me, then. And if I’m really feeling diabolical, I will sometimes amuse myself by sneaking a taboo item into a dish and quietly contain my glee when it is unwittingly consumed. (Like the chicken liver in the traditional Bolognese sauce that Ron loved. Gotcha, smart guy.)

  On the other hand, my son, as he gets older, has started to show flashes of adventurousness. Thanks to some study abroad opportunities he has been able to visit numorous spots in Europe in the past few years. I was stunned to learn that he tried, and liked, things like venison pot pie in London and mussels in Monaco. And he also loves, of all things, calamari.

  Also, Sam has shown some interest in cooking beyond heating up convenience foods. When he started grad school, thus moving from dorm life to apartment life, he asked me to teach him how to make some of his favorites from home. So, he is comfortable making stir fry, ribs and even potato bacon soup from scratch. This is an area his dad would never think of venturing into. He’ll even watch cooking shows with me.

  So, I hold out hope that perhaps at least my son’s palette will expand a bit. My husband, not so much. I think he would probably be content to eat the exact same things week after week – he’s certainly never been one to seek out a lot of variety. (Come to think of it, this is probably the main reason he’s stuck with me for almost three decades, lol.)

  I guess I’ll just have to keep researching green bean recipes and maybe find a way to sneak some mushrooms into something every so often, just to keep things interesting.

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  Posted in Cooking Discussions | Tagged anne freestone, picky eaters

• Church Cookbooks – End of an Era

  Posted at 4:09 pm by Anne Freestone

  Sep 9th

  

  I was going through some of my cookbooks the other day, and found this gem. This is where I obtained what is now my “signature” (at least within our family) green bean casserole, one based on a sour cream sauce and bacon, that has been a staple for Freestone family gatherings for probably 25 years.

  This cookbook represents a largely extinct breed – the church cookbook. These were, for many years, complied by churches as fundraisers – a committee would be formed, recipes gathered from the congregation, and all would be typed up and sent to a publishing company. The company would then usually just photograph the pages as is, make printing plates from that, and print and assemble the pages into books with plastic ring bindings.

  And then they would be sold, hopefully raising more money than the publishing cost. These cookbooks were favorite bridal shower gifts back in the day – and from the handwritten inscription inside the cover, it looks like this was given to me by one of my husband’s aunts at a shower approximately three weeks prior to our wedding in 1991.

  

  I haven’t looked at this cookbook in quite a few years, the green bean recipe having long since been committed to memory and feel, but I decided to more or less read through it the other day. It gave a glimpse into an era of cooking that in today’s fashion of farm to table and fine dining may be sniffed at as “unsophisticated”, but also shows a charming ingenuity and creativity.

  First of all, there is the copious use of prepackaged ingredients – not only canned beans and corn, etc., but lots of canned soups. I mean, a LOT of canned soup – cream of mushroom, cream of celery, cream of chicken – just about any creamed soup you can think of – sometimes two or even three types within one dish. And the jello…used for salads, desserts, you name it – along with its constant companions cream cheese and Cool Whip.

  And then there’s recipes that make you go, “what the…?” – e.g., Pinto Bean Pie and Refried Bean Cake. You have to have some serious imagination to come up with those – not to mention probably being a pretty good salesperson (or good liar) in order to get your family to try them.

  Now, you have to remember that since this cookbook was published in 1990, many of the venerable church ladies who put this together would have been mostly drawing on dishes created perhaps twenty to thirty years prior. And that was, at least in the Midwest, the era of casseroles. (I counted no less than six tuna casserole recipes!) You have to understand that this was a time before cooking channels, before the internet, before you could order prepackaged meal kits, before you could pay someone to shop for and deliver your groceries.

  You had to do it all yourself – and even if a woman didn’t have employment outside the home, she had to take care of the kids, do laundry (including ironing – not much was wrinkle free back then), clean, do the shopping. She also probably served on committees that ran the church, school, clubs, etc. And if she was employed outside the home, she was usually responsible for the cooking, anyway – that’s just the way it was back then. So getting a hot dinner prepared in an hour or so each evening in an era before microwaves were common was a challenge, and you’d take any help you could get.

  Not that there aeren’t representations of more, shall we say, elevated cooking in here- there are some competition winning dishes that sound pretty good – pecan rice, pork florentine, Grand Marnier Souffle – and that look to be accomplished more or less from scratch. But then again, there’s also a Beef Wellington using refrigerated crescent roll dough from a tube. (But Beef Wellington, as a concept, just never made sense to me anyway, even if you do use handmade puff pastry).

  I think what resounds with me most of all, though, is the obvious caring within the pages – the caring of a congregation putting together a book to support their church, and no doubt the joy of sharing some dishes that they were proud of, many of which were probably passed down in their families over many years. As I flip through the pages, I see that Aunt Jane took the time to place handwritten notes next to recipes she had tried and that were her family’s favorites.

  And then there’s the recipe for Burnt Sugar Cake – accredited to Aunt Jane, but that she is sure to notate as coming from her mother in law and my husband’s grandmother, Virginia Freestone, boiled frosting and all – talk about hardcore old school!

  

  I have a feeling I’m going to be making this one.

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  Posted in Cooking Discussions | Tagged anne freestone, church cookbooks, old school cooking

• How I Got Cooking…

  Posted at 2:49 pm by Anne Freestone

  Aug 27th

  When it comes to being a cook, I’m actually rather an unlikely candidate. I would venture to say that the majority of people who end up not only being decent cooks, but actually liking to cook, come by it via the time honored tradition of learning from their mother. (Not to be sexist or anything, but for people my age it was usually your mom that did the cooking. I know things are different now).

  Not so with me. My mother was not a good cook. Worse still, she was one of those bad cooks who have no idea how bad they are. There was, in particular, a quite horrific meatloaf she made once a week that my oldest brother and I referred to years later as having “a scab” on the outside. So I grew up thinking I disliked a lot of foods, when in actuality I’d never had them prepared properly.

  I don’t really know when I got interested in cooking – I did the cooking after I got married, but it certainly wasn’t something that I looked forward to. It may have started when I happened across a used copy of the sixth edition of Joy of Cooking (published in 1975 and the last to be edited by Marion Rombauer Becker, daughter of its original author, Irma Rombauer). This book’s wealth of information on ingredients and techniques, as well as recipes, delivered in a marvelous anecdotal style (that was lost in later editions) is what I think first showed me that food could be interesting. Honestly, if you can get your hands on a 1975 edition of Joy of Cooking, do it – granted some information is outdated after almost 45 years, but the majority of it still holds true and it’s just a fun book to read.

  

  I think what really got me going was all the cooking shows that have proliferated in the last fifteen to twenty years. When I was growing up, the only cooking show of any note was “The Galloping Gourmet”, which I can barely remember since I was a very small child when it was on. What I do remember was Graham Kerr using lots of butter, drinking wine while he cooked and ending every show by leading a tittering house frau out of the audience to share whatever he’d just prepared. I certainly wasn’t old enough to comprehend the cooking angle, but I was amused by the faces he made when he tasted his dishes.

  But now we have entire channels dedicated to food and cooking – not only the more traditional instructional shows, but cooking competitions, world traveling chefs exploring foods of different countries and cultures – you name it. I guess I wonder how anyone would NOT be interesting in cooking these days.

  Which brings me to another subject – foodies. Which, if we define it as someone who spends a lot of time researching and patronizing the hottest restaurants, is definitely something I am not. I am a cook. I actually get more enjoyment from cooking than eating, period. Weird, I know. But I’m fascinated with the process of cooking and creating dishes. When I do eat out, it’s more about getting inspiration for dishes, and I’m usually plotting on the way home how to recreate what I’ve just had and put my spin on it. Fine dining leaves me rather cold – it’s probably my lower middle class Polish Catholic upbringing, but it makes me uncomfortable dropping a hundred dollars for a meal. Not to say there’s anything wrong with that if you like it, but my joy comes from mastering a new dish myself.

  So that’s a bit about me and where I’m coming from in the food and cooking arena. I’d like to hear some of your stories of how you got interested in cooking – who and what inspired you, etc. Meanwhile, I’ll be setting about planning the first posts where we really get down to business and do some actual cooking.

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  Posted in Cooking Discussions | Tagged anne freestone, Galloping Gourmet, Joy of Cooking

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