Chef

I have always enjoyed cooking.  I remember my first experience, standing by myself in the kitchen of our home on West Seneca Street.  I was eleven or twelve years-old and my mother had given me permission to cook my favorite dessert, chocolate pudding, all by myself.  I read the directions on the My-T-Fine package: “Stir mix into two cups of milk in médium sausepan. Bring to full boil on médium heat, stirring constantly.  Serve warm or chilled.”  I preferred chilled.  Making the pudding took only about fifteen minutes.  It was a lot of fun to do and then I could enjoy the resulting dessert a few hours later, all by myself.

After my initial success, my mother gave me another cooking assignment.  We basically ate the same meal every night, what my father liked best.  It was beef, very well done, boiled potatoes, and a lettuce and tomato salad (dressing was a combination of ketchup and mayonaisse).  My job was to boil the potatoes.  First, I peeled them.  Then I cut the potatoes into quarters and put them in a pot of water.  I also added, as part of my mother’s recipe, a small piece of an onion.  Then I would boil the water until the potatoes were soft.  These experiences with the pudding and the potatoes added to my sense of self-esteem.

Unfortunately, my father was utterly helpless in the kitchen.  He could do nothing.  On the rare occasions when my mother was not around to prepare his meals, he had two options.  His favored one was to go to a restaurant.  When he didn’t want to do this, he asked me to make him an omelette.  My recipe was to crack two eggs and put them in a bowl.  Add a little milk and stir.  Then fry until firm enough for his tastes to eat.  Nothing to it.

When I had my own children later in life, I often had to cook for them.  I loved making pancakes for breakfast (using real maple syrup in the batter).  It took me a while to learn how to do it well, but now nobody makes better pancakes than I do.  Of course, spaghetti and meat balls or meat sauce is easy to do.  I got a great recipe from my sister-in-law, Noreen (see March 8th post), for fried chicken cutlets.  One of my favorite side dishes is rice, the way it’s cooked in the United States.  Rice led to a disaster one day in August of 2001.  But that is a story for another day.

I like to make an eggplant dish.  I cut the eggplant into small cube-shaped pieces and place them in a bowl.  Then I add a variety of seasonings such as olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic salt, orégano, and basil.  Finally, I top it off with a generous portion of tomato sauce.  Stir and cook in the oven for about forty minutes.  Yummy and healthy.

My favorite recipe is meatloaf.  Typically, one uses ground beef when making meatloaf.  However, I found an idea on the Internet which calls for combining various types of ground meat, to create new flavors.  I have used, besides ground beef, ground turkey, ground chicken, ground pork, and ground bison in various combinations.  How about ground lamb?  I use about two and a half pounds of meat, then add one cup of bread crumbs, one egg, two teaspoons of salt, one-half teaspoon of pepper, some orégano and basil to taste, some chopped onions, some chopped garlic, three tablespoons of butter, a half cup of hot water, and tomato sauce (or a can of tomato soup).

First, you melt the butter in the hot water.  Then you add all of the above ingredients, save the tomato sauce, and mix.  Then, shape the mixture into a meatloaf.  Place it on a heating pan and cook it in the oven at three hundred fifty degrees for approximately forty minutes (until completely cooked inside).  At the thirty-five minute mark, pour the tomato sauce on top of the meatloaf.  I am confident you will be very happy with the result.

When I was living in Chapel Hill, I cooked breakfast everyday (oatmeal plus blueberries and maple syrup).  I also cooked dinner everyday as well.  Besides the above recipes, I enjoyed grilling chicken thighs and salmon along with a salad using many different components.

For my recent birthday, I made fudge, not known in Brazil, for dessert.  Using an Internet recipe, I mixed 50 grams of unsalted butter with a can of sweetened condensed milk and put it in the microwave for two minutes.  Then I stirred in about four hundred grams of chunks of chocolate, half milk and half dark.  I placed the mixture on a baking pan and put it in the refrigerator of two hours.  Then it was ready to be cut into pieces and enjoyed.    

I don’t get to cook much here in Brazil as our maid prepares our main meal six days a week.  Sometimes I ponder, if I knew then what I know now, what would I do differently if I were twenty years-old.  As I really enjoy cooking, I believe I would go to culinary school and become a chef.  Maybe I’ll go to culinary school anyway to learn how to cook better.