Experimenting in the kitchen

In light of last week’s blog on the restoration of the refrigerator, I decided that this week I will continue the voyage into the restless sea of recipe hunting.

When I was growing up, we lived in a small crack-jack box size house which had a tiny kitchen with no room to put a table.  Our family had five children, so my mother often shooed us out of the kitchen because there was no room to maneuver.  In spite of my father’s efforts to make us girls do work in the kitchen, my mom felt that the pressure was too great to steer girls in different directions to make meals, put things away, wash and put away dishes, and wipe down counters, especially since the only direction in that kitchen was circular.  I must point out that money was tight, and my mom would not want us girls to make a mistake and waste what little supplies we had on experimental meals.

Hence, I never really learned to cook until I received a Betty Crocker cookbook for Christmas from my husband, who had crazy expectations for his non-culinary wife.  Thank God for Betty Crocker.

During those early years of marriage, I determined to be a good cook.  I found recipes for everything under the sun.  Keep in mind, the internet and Pinterest did not exist, so no recipes appears with a few clicks of the mouse.  I perused cookbooks, borrowed, and re-worked recipes of all kinds.  I made soup, chili, hamburgers, pot roast, turkey, stuffed capon, potatoes, vegetables of many kinds, always relying on the cookbooks and other women for new and exciting ways to cook food.

I love to try new recipes, and I am a sucker for any kind of new products for grilling, marinading, or zipping up the taste of the food.  One day I decided to try a recipe for some kind of Thai chicken dish which required two tablespoons of fish sauce and two tablespoons of oyster sauce.  You should have seen me hunting all over the grocery store for those items.  The cost was clearly prohibitive, but did I care? No. I needed those two ingredients, and since I don’t have any friends that use them, I needed to break the bank.  The smell of the fish sauce was revolting.  My gag reflex was reacting violently as I mixed it with the dark, shiny brown, globular oyster sauce.  (Think: dog yakking.) I was afraid to eat my own meal.

My husband loved to entertain, “strangers unaware.”  The meaning of “strangers unaware” to me was more like that the strangers were unaware of what they might encounter on my table.  Thank you, Betty Crocker.  She saved me time after time.

I can tell you emphatically that I have had hundreds of people to my home for dinner over the years, and to this day, I still experiment with guests, even family members.  My kids often ask, “Is this something new?”  My husband used to joke, “Manna?” (Manna means “what is it?”)

Honestly, that did not happen often, but occasionally Mark, my husband, would say, “You don’t need to make that again.”

Some of the fun of experimenting came when missionaries have eaten at my table and had never had a dish like corned beef and cabbage.  Seriously?  They don’t complain; they just take a little bit before they decide that the food is okay to eat.  One time, I fed some Japanese men from Kyushu a meal which included mashed potatoes.  They had no idea what to do with the potatoes.  Mark showed them how to scoop them from the serving bowl and slap them on to the plate.  Such a great memory.

I have several recipe books that I use frequently when I am cooking for other people.  At this point in time, I know of no one who has suffered the adverse effects from my experiments,

Be brave.  Make something you have never tried before and invite some friends to try it.  You might find out that experimental cooking opens new avenues for hospitality, discussion…or ridicule.