Prompt: In the Kitchen
#52ancestors
This week I’m writing about my grandchildren’s ancestors again.
Far away from home when we first married, my new husband was longing for home cooking. I knew how to cook but to him home cooking was Japanese food, along with southern Mississippi. So, trying to be a good wife, I decided to learn to cook the foods that he missed. I called my mother-in-law to get her recipes, but she cooked like my mother. A little bit of this and a smidgen of that mixed in with ingredients that I had never heard of. Not to mention I was trying to create a dish that I had never tasted. It was trial and error at its best. I would try. He would taste it and tell me that it wasn’t quite like his mother's but good, just needed a little more of something. No matter how bad it was, he ate it and tried to help me get it right the next time.
After he got out of the Navy the first time, we lived with my mother-in-law for about a month while we painted my parent’s house before moving into it. During that time and for a long time after we moved out, she taught me to cook my husband’s favorite foods.
One of my favorite memories was when she was teaching me to cook sukiyaki. It isn’t a hard meal, and it is generally cooked family style. She used an electric fry pan in the center of the dining room table and as the slivers of meat and vegetables cooked, we would use chop sticks to move them from the pan to our plates. Sounds simple but it wasn’t. It took several hours prior to the meal to prepare the beef strips and all the vegetables and yam noodles. Each piece had to be cut in a very precise manner, the same size and with the ends cut at the perfect angle. As we were cutting the vegetables, I started getting in a hurry and my vegetables were not the perfect uniform shape. Before I realized what had happened, Mom reached out and smacked my hands with her chopsticks. I think she was more shocked than I was when she realized what she had done. I had to duck my head to hide my smile at her shocked expression. That is when I knew she thought of me as her daughter. She was so used to handling her two boys that it was an automatic reaction to my carelessness.
Several years later, I was checking my mother’s recipes. I found some written in my Dad’s Mother’s handwriting. Recipes like minced meat pie and rhubarb pie. My Mother told me that her mother-in-law gave her the recipes to make sure she could cook my Dad’s favorites. I guess my experiences learning to cook Japanese were not much different than what every new wife goes through.
Oh, and by the way, my husband is now a pretty good cook himself and his sushi rolls are tighter than mine.
No comments:
Post a Comment