Gwendolyn and Ian,
This is a book of recipes of the foods you grew up with.
Your father is not a chef. I’m just a cook. I like to think of myself as a food engineer, though. At times, anyway. If I want to cook something new, I head to the internet to look up various recipes for that dish. I take what I want from some recipes, I leave other things out, and I come up with a starting point. From that first time making the dish I’ll make adjustments until I home in on “just right”. That’s what cooks do: start with a recipe, improve it, and make it their own.
A chef, on the other hand, creates dishes out of thin air. I’m not so good at that. “I think I’ll take these random ingredients in the cupboard and make some kind of lasagna with it!” I don’t do that. For me, random ingredients go into fried rice (that’s “Daddy Rice” to you), burritos, or maybe a frittata. What Alton Brown calls “tour de frigo” (tour of the refrigerator) dishes. That’s more my style.
I don’t know if you’ll turn out to be more chef than cook but I do know that, should you decide to make some of these dishes, you will also make them your own. Maybe cook the meatballs completely in sauce rather than in the oven. Or add carrots to Split Pea Soup. Whatever it is, you’ll make these dishes your own for your family. Hopefully some of those will be passed along to your children and on it goes. That’s another thing cooks do: we pass it along.
You grew up in a household where the meals were mostly made from scratch. That’s important today and it gets more important all the time. I knew what ingredients were going into your meals. If one of you didn’t like something, I had to work around that. We ended up with good food and made you happy…until Ian decided he didn’t like Pesto. But meals, especially dinner, were more than just the food. It was a time for the family to come together. That was the important part and it’s something I really hope you continue. Whether it was with your mother or with Rosa, I made it a priority for all of us to be together during meals whenever possible.
That’s not something that cooks or even chefs necessarily do. That’s what a family does.
Daddy
October 19, 2016
