Let me start by saying my mother taught me how to bake, but not necessarily how to cook. I take that back…I learned how to cook, but I didn’t have ANY kind of knack for it, and my mother was probably all too happy to let me take care of measuring flour and sugar and leave the cooking to her, or to my sisters.
Episode 1 – See, Mommy? I cooked dinner so you wouldn’t have to!
When I was maybe 10, I tried to cook dinner on my own for my mother. Mommy was out doing something, and I remember thinking she was going to be tired and I wanted to help. The options for what I could cook with my extremely limited skillset narrowed to ramen noodles or macaroni and cheese. I chose the mac and cheese. I vaguely remember reading the box and following the directions, my mother coming home, being all proud about cooking dinner, and her asking if I’d turned the heat off on the stove when I cooked the macaroni and cheese? Result: burned mac and cheese by the 10 year old in the 7th grade. Mommy had to cook dinner anyway.
Episode 2 – Cooking dinner to impress the boyfriend, his friend, and my roommate
Fast forward to college, my junior year, at CWU, 18 years old (graduated early and did my AA at a community college). I was dating a guy from Mexico whose buddy was dating my friend and second roommate. She and I decided one night to do dinner for the guys. I wanted to make the dish I grew up knowing as casserole – ground beef cooked with tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots, served over rice. It’s another of the comfort foods I enjoy (however, I can never get it to taste anything like my mother’s did…so we don’t have it that often). We bought the groceries we needed, found a kitchen to use, and set to work. The dinner was nice, except the rice was a little crunchy – and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I’d done wrong. I thought I’d followed all of the directions I’d gotten from my mother: I sauteed the rice in 1 tbsp butter until it glistened, then covered it and let it cook covered on low heat for 10 minutes, then uncovered it, stirred it and added another bit of butter to the center of the rice and stirred until the butter melted.
To give you a sense of how little I knew about cooking…it wasn’t until I was making that same dish a year later that I finally realized…I hadn’t added the water to the rice! I don’t think I ever told my mother about that incident. Or the fact it took me a year to realize what I’d done wrong!
Episode 3 – Give me tuna and creamed corn, and I shall make myself a dinner never to be forgotten.
A couple years later, I was living in an apartment, and Rich and I had just started dating. I was working full time and going to school part time for my Masters in Business Administration. It had been a late day at work and I was STARVING, but I only had a few minutes before I had to be at class. I didn’t have time to stop by Rich’s parents’ to grab dinner with them, which had been my plan. I was on my own for this one. I knew I needed protein, else I’d have a splitting headache by the end of the night, but I also had been taught by my mother to always have some sort of vegetable with dinner. I rummaged through the pantry and found the quick things to heat up: tunafish and creamed corn. I think I’d had tuna noodle casserole earlier or something…but I figured I liked tuna, and I liked creamed corn, and I was short on time and short on pots, so why not mix the two together?
Maybe THAT was why my father-in-law was so surprised when I took a pie I’d made entirely from scratch to their house and he loved it…
Episode 4 – Okay, okay, I can’t cook…but I can still impress the future in-laws with a dish from my mother’s country!
Rich’s family was all together for Christmas that year. I decided I wanted to make Salvadorian Quezadilla. I got all the ingredients out at Rich’s mom’s house, and I started the mixing. Rich had said at some point that “a real Johnson doesn’t need to crack eggs with two hands – a real Johnson can crack an egg with one hand while using the other to keep stirring.” As he and I were still dating, and I was trying to not only impress him but his family as well, I tried doing the whole one-handed-egg-cracking thing. That egg cracked all right…and fell, shell and all, into the already-going mixer. I immediately stopped it, and picked out all the small eggshell pieces I could find in the batter (note – that Bosch was mixing faster than I intended it to and had already gone around a few times before I stopped it). I figured I’d retrieved all the eggshell pieces and kept going with the batter. I was so excited to share the dessert – it smelled WONDERFUL! Johnson family – be impressed!
I think it was Rich’s older brother’s wife, Kjaristy, who crunched on the eggshell first. It ended up being dubbed eggshell cake…everyone got some eggshell in the dessert. I think they all still hesitate just a little if I say I’m going to make it.