How Did You Learn to Cook? & Book Love
From cookies to lasagne and beyond...
I’m curious…how did you learn to cook?
For me, it wasn’t really a how, but a why…Why *did* I learn to cook?
Simple answer: because as a young kid, I yearned for more than one cookie.
But before we go into my early cookie obsession…
Last time, I mentioned we were having another insane apple harvest. Choosing apples for the crisp John and I planned, to use up some fruit, I gazed at our piles of Honeycrisp apples in consternation.
Our shop fridge was already stuffed with hundreds of apples, and every nook and cranny of the house fridge was filled too: William’s Pride, Akane, Tsugaru, and Red Gravenstein. Then came the Honeycrisp harvest: I’d picked about 150, many of them huge, bigger than John’s fist.
Our neighbors had plenty of their own apples, and we’d already set aside two ginormous bags for my sister’s two horses.
Now, my husband John and I had been to this rodeo before. But this year’s apple harvest seemed more overwhelming than ever.
Yet making that crisp led to a revelation. That sunny afternoon, as John methodically sliced up apples, I asked, “Honey, what are we going to do with them all?”
Not that I expected a solution. There wasn’t one.
“Well,” he said, not pausing in his task, “Cut ‘em up and freeze ‘em?”
Cubing butter for the crisp topping, I said, “I don’t think that’ll work. Won’t the apples just turn into mush?”
Still, I set my bowl aside to do a search—and had to eat my words (pun intended)!
My first click took me to a farm wife turned professional home cook, and her website had—ta-da—a perfectly doable recipe for freezing cut-up apples! “Actually, you’re right!” I said to John in amazement.
Suddenly our hundreds of apples didn’t freak me out quite as much as a few minutes before.
This farm gal had learned to cook as a little girl, preparing food with her mother—a mom of five who somehow had the energy to work full time and run the family business…and make a home-cooked meal every night. The farm gal had a photo of the two of them, wearing wide smiles.
John had learned to cook the same way: working alongside his mom, making pancakes, cookies and pies.
Although I didn’t have that experience, I was a foodie from way back. As I closed the farm gal’s website, my early attempts to cook came back to me.
As a young kid, I was motivated to try baking—and was an experienced cook by my early twenties. How it all came about, I realized, was a combination of osmosis, my lovely first mother-in-law, and Betty Crocker.
Still, when you get down to it, I started making things to eat because I was always hungry!
My dad’s mother, who spent winters at our house in St. Cloud Minnesota, was a very quiet lady who showed her love by feeding people. In her 70s during my childhood, Grandma was rather frail, but at Thanksgiving, she would prepare the turkey and pumpkin pie.
Her everyday specialties were icebox cookies and carrot-orange Jello. Yet was her Spritz cookies, pressed into the shapes of our initials, that captured my heart—and taste buds.
I can still see the buttery goodness of my “S” cookie in my mind’s eye. We kids—there were five of us—would get several apiece. (Looking back, I see the initial thing was a wise strategy: you only got to eat the cookies with your letter!)
The months Grandma was back at her North Dakota home, my dad frequented a bakery downtown. A meat-and-potatoes man, he had extremely plain tastes, but a super sweet tooth.
He’d bring home loaves of fresh-baked white bread, a few doughnuts for his breakfast, and a paper sack of frosted sugar cookies.
Five of them.
I’d eat mine right away, always wishing for more.
By the time I was eight, I took matters into my own hands. Here’s where the osmosis comes in: I must have watched Grandma baking, because I made my first batch of chocolate chip cookies on my own.
I could eat as many as I liked, and enough dough to give myself a stomachache!
I have no memory of anyone showing me how to cook savory food, but soon I was making my mom breakfast: bacon, fried eggs and buttered toast. By age ten, my stove-top success gave me the confidence to try one of my favorite sweets: caramels.
They remain one of my most spectacular failures. You may wonder how I can recall one cooking project from many, many decades ago? Well, I was a perfectionist child, and was so embarrassed by the ruined mess of cooked sugar I hid the pan in my bedroom for three days.
When I was 11, our family moved to Michigan, and soon after, I discovered boxed pizza kits (a packet of flour with leavening, a can of sauce, and a wee container of Parmesan). With pizza now in my repertoire, there was no stopping me.
Before long, I recruited a foodie co-conspirator: my sister, one year younger. Grandma, who I will miss forever, had passed along by then. But our family wound up with her little tin of recipes on 3x5 index cards.
Had she written out her Thanksgiving recipes? I have no idea. Yet in our early teens, my sister and I managed to muddle our way through preparing our family’s turkey.
In the summers, the two of us would pick buckets off plums from the tree in our backyard, then rustle up cobblers and crisps. Then our joint food horizons took an unexpected turn: on a family visit out of state, our aunt served a big pan of lasagne.
At 14, I had never tasted anything so good in all my life… Part 2 of this story next time!
I would love to know: How did you learn to cook?
Celebrating Life with Food…and Books!
This post marks the two-year anniversary of my newsletter! I’m celebrating by tweaking it a bit…it’s now “This Little Farm Life with Susan Colleen Browne”!
I’ll continue to share my usual garden and homesteady updates. But now that garden chores are winding down (actually, I have just as many tasks, all the things I didn’t get around to spring/summer/fall, I just run out of daylight a lot sooner!), I’m focusing a bit more on two things that bring me joy.
As you see from the cooking segment above, lately I’ve been thinking about my foodie roots. And my current life as someone who’s gotten into the habit of rushing through meals.
For several years, with the pressure of so much to do around here, I’d pretty well forgotten how to enjoy my food—eating had become how to get the energy to do more stuff.
A few weeks ago, it dawned on me all that I was missing with my habit of simply refueling. It wasn’t good for my health either. So I’ve been putting a bigger priority on 1) enjoying my meals, and 2) preparing super-nourishing, hearty food.
My renewed pleasure will no doubt make its way into “This Little Farm Life”!
The second focus…more books!
I’ve been an avid reader since childhood, and through the decades, even when life was busiest, I always had a book on the go. But again, for the last few years, just as I was losing my true pleasure in eating, reading books had become very hit-and-miss—a few pages here or there.
However, since late last spring, I’ve been on a novel-reading binge—I think I’ve read more books in the last six months than the last six years! Unfortunately, though, in these same six months, I have done little more than tinkerdoodle with my fiction. As a writer of books, I have to wonder:
Am I reading more novels because for now, I’m content to simply muddle along with my current story? Or,
Am I not feeling my usual novel-writing urgency because, for the first time in many years, I’m giving myself permission to read a novel at least one hour every day?
I haven’t figured it out. Maybe I’m getting all my joy of language and characters and plot from other writer’s novels. Maybe it’s because to everything there is a season, and this must be my season of book reading!
However, putting my fiction on the back burner this summer has a lot to do with giving up my usual creative writing time to work on our garden/homestead. Earlier this year, I had actually vowed to myself that *this* would be the year I finally got the garden under control.
All you gardeners have probably made similar vows.
So I may as well confess that in these same years, not reading much and not really enjoying my meals, my grandparenting activities had picked up—at times, exponentially.
And yup, while I’ve been keeping up with our food-growing areas—weeding/ mulching/soil-building—I’ve pretty well left the rest of the garden to its own devices.
Every uncultivated area between my lovingly cared-for beds had become a weed-choked mess.
You same gardeners are probably snickering at the idea of someone thinking you can catch up on years of neglect in one growing season! Still, my renewed focus on the garden as a whole this season did bring some unexpected successes…
Never Have I Ever Department:
One brand-new thing I did this summer was plant half of my usual number of potato hills in one bed.
Resulting in potato plants that were two times bigger than any I’d ever grown!
Here’s the yield from the same bed, which I harvested this week:
My iPad camera makes everything look smaller, but several of these spuds are more than 5-inches long!
You can bet I’ll be giving my potatoes lots of leg room at planting time next spring!
Again, I hope you’ll share how you learned to cook, or maybe some especially memorable food you’ve made lately…
Or any great reads you’ve come across!
As always, thank you so much for spending time at my Little Farm. If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll press the handy ❤️ button! Sending all my best from my garden to yours…
Warmly,
~Susan, from the Foothills
This was so special to read! Thank you for putting this “on paper”. I didn’t know some of these stories. I, of course, learned to cook from you and Grandma Pat. A lot of my staples are from Aunt Patti, too! Lately it’s Instagram but without the skills I was taught, I wouldn’t be able to add my own touches either saving time or money.
I cooked in secret when my Mum was out as the kitchen was too busy when she was home. But it was rarely very 'secret' when she got home and discovered what I'd burnt or broken!