A Joy of Cooking

I take joy in cooking, and baking. I'd even say it's something I'm good at. The first cooking lessons I can recall, if you could call them lessons, were helping my grandmother in the kitchen. Everything Grammy cooked or baked was always the best, and there are scents that can take me back to 5 years old playing on the street in front of Grammy and Grandad's house, with Sunday Dinner being made in the Kitchener. Grammy grew up as the youngest child of seven, I think it was, on a farm in North Dakota, and she was small - only five feet tall, while her brothers were all over six feet tall. One of her jobs was to help cook for the farm hands, and by the time she became my grandmother she had many years of practice under her belt.

She did not need a mixer to whip butter and sugar for her famous sugar cookies; she could get it light and fluffy all by hand, using a runcible spoon. And she never bothered with measuring cups or spoons - it was two sticks of Blue Bonnet margarine, this much sugar, two eggs, be sure to spill the vanilla a little, whip until it is light and creamy. About that much flour - no, a little more, and a pinch of salt. A bit of baking powder - just enough to fill the divot in the center of her palm, then smooth it out with a finger so there are no lumps in it and mix that into the flour and salt, then sift that all into the butter mixture and mix to combine. Chill the dough. Roll it into balls and then roll those in a bowl of sugar. Put them on a baking sheet - whoops, that one just jumped into my mouth, didn't it? - and bake at 425 until done. I'm probably forgetting something - I never did learn to make her sugar cookies, nor any of the fabulous Sunday Dinners she used to cook - pot roast, chicken-fried steak, sukiyaki, broiled snapper, just to name a few. My eldest sister took over most of the cooking in our household. But that didn't stop me from my own journey of cooking and baking.

When I was six, I loved watching Graham Kerr "The Galloping Gourmet" and Julia Childs, probably as much as I loved Captain Kangaroo, but I don't think I really started baking until my freshman year in college, when I started making chocolate chip cookies to appease my roommate. Then came cheesecake - not the frozen cheese pie in a store-bought graham cracker crust here - I am talking a heavy, full on New York style cheesecake with hint of citrus in a homemade short-bread crust, baked in a spring-form pan. I made one of these for my girlfriend for her 25th birthday. Thirty-two years later she's still married to me. Just sayin'. And I am very proud of the fact that I've had requests for my cheesecakes from as far away as Karachi, Pakistan.

I am the primary cook in the family, and I've a large collection of other recipes from over 30 years, some from even before that. My junior year of college I lived in Germany, in a student apartment, so had to do most of my own cooking. There's this one potato salad with chicken recipe I got from a 1985 copy of "Meine Familia und Ich" - kind of the German version of Family Circle Magazine. Chicken breast cut into bite-sized pieces, marinated in soy sauce and sauteed in butter. Red potatoes, celery, red bell pepper, capers. Home-made mayonnaise using fresh egg yolk and olive oil with a bit of lemon juice and mustard for flavor. I may not remember much German, but bits of that recipe still come readily to mind: Eine rote Paprikenschote. Zwei stange Stundenzelerei. Die Huenchin im heisem Fett gebraten. Nur kurz durchzheien und auskuhlen lassen. Some years later when I discovered Peruvian blue potatoes I reinvented the dish as a "Red White and Blue Chicken Potato Salad" for the 4th of July holiday, and I still make it at least once a year.

Every now and then I'll go nuts and spend an entire day cooking - like the time I made Moosewood Kitchen's Eggplant Almond Enchiladas from scratch, making my own tortillas, using eggplant from my garden, as well as making the sauce with my own home-grown tomatoes and herbs. Not something I'll probably ever do again, but it's a memory I'll always cherish. And I suppose that's part of the point of it for me, and part of my point in sharing this; cooking, to me, isn't just about making food to nourish the body. That's important, certainly, but for me the whole process nourishes my soul - it really does give me joy. That more often than not it results in something tasty I can share with others is just a bonus.

— Zachary