"Kswck" > wrote in message
...
> Parent, other family member, friend? Or did you have to learn on your own?
>
> Mom boiled every veggie to death. Figure ALL pork must be cooked in a fry
> pan covered with mustard and sauerkraut, till it's dead, beef so rare it
> would moo and chicken ONLY in a pressure cooker, or Shake-N-Bake.
> (Don't get me started on her soups-she believed food was to keep you
> alive...taste? 'You want that too? Why?').
>
> Learned on my own.
>

Sounds like I wasn't alone with a mother who struck terror in the eyes of
every utensil in her kitchen. Pots were dented when she threw them at my
father when he came home drunk as usual. She never connected with him, just
the walls, but the pans took the brunt of the assault. Her meals either a)
came out of a can or b) came from Banquet or Swanson. In the mid-60's tv
dinners were just becoming all the rage, so that is what she invested in.
Then wondered in the 70's why both she and my father developed diabetes,
high blood pressure and in her case CHF. My aunties clucked their tongues
at her attempts at food and 'showed' me things when I was over. One had 10
kids and 12 fosters, so she cooked to feed an army (we have a newspaper
article written about her in her final days stating she used a 25 lb. bag of
flour a week) it is she I learned how to stretch a recipe from. My other
auntie, who had five kids with multiple friends, also showed me different
things. Friends of the family had massively huge gardens (minimum five
acres each) and always needed extra hands to help pick, shuck, string or
prep veggies to can, and in the cooler months, to help with the
slaughtering. I may have been a mere kidlet, but these kind ladies always
'invited' me to help explaining what they were doing as they did it. They
knew that cooking was never something my mom would consider doing and if
this poor child were going to learn, it would have to be them that taught
me. Couldn't have some poor child leaving the South (NC) for school and not
know how to cook!

When I left for college, I actually lost weight, since cafeteria food was
made in the kitchen not out of a box with all the preservatives. I wanted
to cook, so I invested in the Campus Crusade for Christ cookbook at the
college bookstore and the Woman's Day cookbook collection at the local
grocers (I still only got to N - I guess I never will find out what Woman's
Day says to cook O-Z). I cooked something in the common area of the dorms,
got rave reviews and thus created the monster. I bought more cookbooks,
people gave me cookbooks, I picked cookbooks out of dumpsters..........my
need for cookbooks........it went from one shelf to three, to a whole
bookcase, to boxes, to more boxes, now to a room floor to ceiling with
shelves of them.......Been married 25 years and hubby is twice the size he
was when I married him and kids seem to like what I put in front of them, so
I guess it was a combination of things. My reference ladies were left
behind when I went to college, so I bought books. When I moved from Philly
to outside of Allentown, I fell in with a group of people whose sons were
also in Boy Scouts. One woman was making jelly. I asked her how, and then
came another obsession.......she felt it was beneath her to show off what
she made. Me, on the other hand, wanted to know I made something worth
eating, so I inquired about the Fair. Now a Ribbon Whore was born. We
were late getting the internet and I soon learned to enter 'jam' into Google
and there I found the Queen of All Jellies and Jams, Barb. Soon struck up a
friendship that goes to this day, I ended up on this NG (as well as a few
other we won't mention here). So who taught me to cook.......No one and
everyone. Thanks guys.
-ginny