For The Love Of Family and Friends...
I love getting good recipes and I also love sharing them with others!
The problem is that many of my recipes have been handed down to me ... Not so much by word of mouth. Instead, they were mostly handed down by experience.
The raw and staple ingredients filled the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator of my home from the time I could remember. The aromas and textures and scents differentiated my home from any other home I stepped into.Nothing teased my palate more than my Mom's Chicken Paprikas with her home made noodles cut into a specific shape that we called "osze visza teszta". The only time she ever cut it into this shape was for this specific meal... Every memory I have of the meals my Mom dished onto my dinner plate as I sat at the table surrounded by my many brothers and Mom and Dad fed not only my body, but also, to a certain degree, my well being... It was a really good constant in my life.
My earliest memories of cooking date back to when I was three and four years old. My mom had a little single burner stove top next to her in the kitchen where she cooked that I was able to commandeer. Whatever she put in her pot, I put in mine, and my poor Dad was the lucky recipient of all my masterpieces...
Today, I can better appreciate how "seasoned" those first creations must have been after having the great and entertaining pleasure of watching my sweet little granddaughter season a chicken we were going to roast. She loved shaking the bottle of spike onto that chicken! "It" wasn't enough until the bottle was empty! And THAT WAS THAT!! There was no way of convincing her of any other idea.
This little one is a worker bee...
Grandma's sweet helper...
Bentley stringing celery while Grandma unseasoned the chicken a bit ;-)
As terrible as it sounds to a culture so far removed from having livestock in the back yard as the families food source, I literally have memories of being out in our yard in Hungary as a little three and four year old ... looking longingly into the chicken coup fantasizing about how amazing they were going to taste after we cooked them for dinner. I hungered after their delicious drum sticks and thighs and breasts and wings. We didn't raise them as our pets ... we raised them as our food supply!
I never remember going hungry ... or starving ... but I also never remember having so much food at our disposal that we were wasteful or had any to throw away. We had a garden and we had our chickens and ducks and geese and would butcher a pig when we could. Very little (if anything) went to waste. To this day, the most satisfying meals are the basics... Meat, Starch, Veggies, Fruit... Crackers and chips and the likes can be passed by but a steaming bowl of homemade soup or a moist piece of fried chicken can't be matched by any store bought processed substitute...
Cooking from scratch has always been an important and central part of my life. All of my memories connected with food, started and ended in our little kitchen. We rarely ate out. Instead, meals were the fruit of my Mom's continual and diligent labor of love.
After escaping Hungary ... shuffling in and out of refuge camps throughout Italy for approximately six months , we arrived in Los Angeles in late December of 1969. Both Mom and Dad went to work full time, yet Mom would come home each evening around five and begin her nightly routine of cooking our dinner. EVERYTHING was homemade ... the bread, the noodles, soups, paprikas, goulash, roasted meats, stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers, meatloaf, sausages... desserts.... Yum...
Dinner was eaten as a family around the kitchen table and nothing went to waste. We didn't have to ration our portions to keep from eating too much. We rationed our portions so everyone would get enough to survive. As kids, we used to play games to see who could manage to hoarde the "last bite". When someone thought they were the one, they'd pull their little bite of chicken or whatever else had been stashed out of site and triumphantly eat it in front of everyone ... like HA! I got the last bite! Only to be outdone by someone else who had something hidden somewhere else. Their laugh was a little louder as they trumped the last supposed hoarder... I don't remember ever over eating ... but I sure remember enjoying my meals... As a kid, I loved my Mom's cooking... It was the beautiful sunset to my day.
Memories of meals together as a family changed drastically during the summer of 1976. It was America's Bicentennial year... And, seemingly, over night, my parents decided to move our family from Long Beach to Desert Hot Springs to purchase and operate a "Family Restaurant".
This was the second time in my life where everything in my life changed from one day to the next. I walked out of my room and out of my house one day and never returned. I didn't pack a single thing. I didn't take any "last looks" with the realization that things were changing. I didn't say goodbye to neighbors. Instead, everything just changed. Just like my life in Hungary abruptly came to an end one day ... My life in Long Beach also came to a sudden end. Both periods in my life feel like someone else's life. There was no bridge between the old and the new. Just a sudden and irreversible change with everything starting over from a new beginning.
Life in a restaurant atmosphere is very different from life in a home atmosphere. No matter how much "work" a home seems to entail ... it pales in comparison to the amount of never ending work a restaurant requires. From cooking for our family, my Mom began cooking in much larger quantities. Cooking became a HUGE production and we were all drafted into the family work force. We no longer had a bread drawer where my Mom's big crusty loaf of homemade bread was wrapped in a dish cloth for us to carve off of. instead we now had a whole freezer full of loaves and loaves of fresh frozen bread that had to continually be stocked by my Mom's hard work. During that period of time it never felt like I was "learning to cook" like in the old days in Hungary on my little single burner mini stove top. I was mostly learning how to work ... hard and long...
My Mom's hard work no longer put nightly meals on our dinner table at home ... In fact, our dinner table at home was always empty in the evenings. Our combined hard work put meals on the table for an always changing number of customers that would or would not show up each night. EVERYTHING we did was in grand scale. When we peeled potatoes, it wasn't five or ten or even twenty ... it was fifty pound bags. Carrots? Onions? Chicken? Shrimp? EVERYTHING was in BULK...
I moved away from home just before my 17th birthday to begin my freshman year at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. I began thinking back and longing for my mom's meals made from scratch, and so began trying my hand at recreating the textures and flavors and scents I had left behind. I started making those SOS calls to my mom ... "how do you make this" or "how do you make that"? I had a lot of experience around food but this was where the rubber met the road. This was the time to take my solo flights ... learning by trial and error until the tastes and textures were fine tuned.
One of my funniest memories occurred shortly after moving in with my good friend Joyce. I could find pots and pans of all shapes and sizes at our restaurant but this was no longer the case in our little apartment on the corner of 7th street and Long Beach Blvd. I wanted to make my Mom's yummy bean soup but the only thing I could find coming close to a soup pot was the clay insert to Joyces crock pot. I had never used a crock pot but knew that things cooked piping hot in them and after some skeptical consideration, my roommate and I decided to go ahead and put the clay pot onto the stove top and cross our fingers that it could work if we kept the heat as low as possible. I was on the phone with my mom adding the ingredients to the filled "pot" when we experienced a loud explosion from the cracking of the clay pot into two equal halves. The pot separated and the red sea parted... all over and throughout the stove and kitchen floor... I never tried that again...
And although I did not leave home or the restaurant feeling like I knew how to cook ... I was certainly familiar with the world of cooking ... raw ingredients ... cuts of meat, etc. Most of all, I had the wonderful memories of the many tastes and scents from the delicious meals my Mom and Dad cooked ... and I couldn't even begin to contemplate settling for Campbell's soup when I knew what the real deal was all about.
I love to cook and I love to feed people. "BUT" I like feeding people as "guests" not as customers. I like cooking for and WITH family and friends socially ... not as a business.
If you don't know this yet, I will tell you something very important about me and cooking ... please know that "friends" ... "true friends" do not ever tell me I should open a restaurant... I like to cook for fun and for free...
SO!!! Back to the soup recipe I want to share! Growing up in a home where soup was almost a daily staple, yet not having a single written recipe for any of them has made sharing a lot of recipes very difficult. I can show you much easier than I can tell you... And it is also a lot more fun to cook together.
A few years ago, I compiled a keepsake cookbook for my kids and their Grandmas for Christmas. My idea was that I would do my best to compile the recipes I had gathered that were their favorites, while also attempting to put things in written form the loved meals that had been handed down from mother to daughter ... mother to daughter throughout the years.
My hope was that as they would try cooking the recipes, I would get feedback and we could keep tweaking them till we got them just right. The editing of many of the recipes still needs to be done. Hopefully as I share the recipes, that will happen more and more.
The first recipe I am going to share with you is:
No comments:
Post a Comment