Time-tested Recipes, Stories & Nostalgia
My love for cooking and my love for the man who would become my husband both had their origin in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1989. Paul said it dawned on him that evening that if I could make asparagus taste that good, he saw promise in the relationship.
You really need a sheet pan with a rim to catch any runaway juices. Don’t use a cookie sheet unless you fancy the excitement of an oven fire. If you don’t already have them, a couple heavy-duty sheet pans are the best New Year’s gifts you can give your kitchen.
The opportunity, or government order, to pause and spend time at home is an introvert’s dream. Weekends when the only thing on my “to do” list was to plan, shop for, create, and savor an elaborate dinner for my family is nothing short of a gift, no matter the cause.
When my niece, Abigail, was about 4, she declared she was a vegetarian. She saw Charlotte’s Web and couldn’t fathom the inhumanity of consuming Wilbur or any of his barnyard pals. For headstrong Abigail, vegetarianism stuck.
While it didn’t originate in the Strawberry Kitchen of the 1970s, this recipe for chicken pot pie very well could have, with its tell-tale ingredients of cream of celery soup and canned veggies. Please don’t hold the pedestrian ingredients against it.
In the 1970s, fish was what Catholics ate on Fridays. We weren’t Catholic. On Fridays, my parents would typically load us in the back of the Country Squire wagon and head out to Shakey’s Pizza or Pappy’s Hamburgers before taking in a family-friendly movie at the theater.
Fair warning: this blog post is rated R, or at least a hard PG-13. If you’re offended by ribald humor, tune in again next week when we’ll be back to serving up the literary equivalent of tea cakes on lace doilies. This post also goes all the way around my elbow to get to my thumb.
It pains me to admit it, but I was a culinary Barbarian as a child. I dug the soft doughy centers out of French bread and dinner rolls, leaving the crusts in unsightly piles at the edge of my plate. I only liked lettuce of the iceberg variety, doused with salty Italian dressing.
Do you remember your first adult dinner party? By that I mean, not a yawning affair you got dragged to by your parents, but rather a dinner you attended as a newly-minted adult, invited by a host who presumed you would be good company and an appreciative guest?