Around the Kitchen Table: Your First Time in the Kitchen + 5-Book #Giveaway

 

PEG COCHRAN/MARGARET LOUDON: Do you remember the first things you learned to cook? I remember being about 12 and making what we called "Girl Scout stew"--probably because the recipe was in the Girl Scout handbook. It's more popularly known as "campfire stew." Every once in awhile my mother would put me "in charge" of dinner and I would make it--browning the ground beef, adding a can of tomato sauce and some elbow macaroni. My first attempt at a dessert was a cake made from scratch from a recipe from one of my mother's cookbooks. My girlfriend and I made it together. We had the brilliant idea of dying it green. Let me tell you, green cakes are not very appetizing looking! Also, the cake could have served as a doorstop it was so leaden. Even the birds didn't want to eat it!

I got a cookbook for a wedding present called Make it Now, Bake It Later. I tried one recipe and it was very successful so I decided to try another one. I should have been warned off by the list of ingredients, which included those tiny canned shrimp and white bread! That experiment ended up in the garbage.

Can you remember your first experiments in the kitchen?

LESLIE BUDEWITZ: Somehow, I don't think you're talking about the time when I was about 4 and climbed up on the kitchen counter to toast saltines. Don't try that at home. Fortunately, the flames scorched the underside of the upper cabinets but didn't cause any real damage.

I was a Girl Scout too and loved camp cooking. My first summer at overnight camp, the cook, a burly man named Pat who went by "Irish," gave me the blue ribbon for best pancakes, made in a cast iron skillet over an open fire. I was pretty sure he felt sorry for me because I'd struggled to get my fire going.

My mother was well-known for her Christmas cookies. One Saturday when I was about 8, she was away and my dad, a traveling salesman who was gone most weeknights and rarely cooked, decided we should make sugar cookies. He found a recipe in her Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook that included powdered sugar. We cut out holiday shapes---I still have her cookie cutters, decorated them with colored sugar---I'm guessing we tinted it ourselves using food coloring, and were inordinately proud of ourselves. Whether they were any good, there's no one left to ask, but I know they brimmed with the sweet taste of joy!

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MADDIE DAY: Oh, so many first time memories! My mother had a serious sweet tooth, and my older sisters and I always baked Thanksgiving pies and Christmas cookies with her.

But Mommy and I shared a love of creamed tuna on toast that nobody else in the family liked. I remember watching carefully as she drained the tuna oil into the saucepan and stirred flour into it, then gradually stirred in milk until she had a cream sauce. Add the tuna and some frozen peas, toast a few slices of Oroweat day-old wheat bread, and the two of us were in heaven.

When I was a teen I begged my mom for the secret family formula for the dish. I HAD to have the recipe for creamed tuna on toast on a 3"x5" card for my new recipe box. Her response? "Go look it up in Joy of Cooking." Reader, I was crushed.

I don't have a photo of creamed tuna on toast, but here's me and Marilyn Flaherty Maxwell Muller - aka Mommy - in about 2010.

I made the dish for my older son for years, and he loved it (he might still if not for that pesky vegetarian diet he and his wife keep) (Sorry, Molly!).

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LUCY BURDETTE: My mother did not much like to cook but did what she had to in order to feed six every night, and then we cleaned up. She also was a Girl Scout leader and I do remember the campfire stew, Peg! But the first thing I made (for a boy I had a crush on who loved Twinkies) was a giant Twinkie-shaped sponge cake that I stuffed with whipped cream. I came downstairs the next morning to find it crawling with ants...Did I give it to him anyway?? I can't remember!

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VALERIE (V.M.) BURNS: When I was in elementary school, we had a program where we could purchase books every month. I think it was a Scholastic Book Club. I bought my first book. It was a cookbook, The Cookie Book by Eva Moore. There were twelve cookie recipes, one for each month of the year. I think the first recipe that I made was either Snicker doodles or peanut butter cookies. They were simple recipes with easy instructions. We had a white toy poodle named Candy (she was the start of my love of poodles) and from the moment I started pulling out bowls and ingredients, she planted herself in the kitchen and refused to leave. When the baking sheet went into the oven, she got excited. As soon as the cookies came out, she would bark and scratch at the kitchen cabinets until I gave her one of the cookies. Yes, I used my dog as a guinea pig...umm, I mean taste tester. Candy loved them. She was particularly fond of the peanut butter cookies. You may not think a dog's approval means much, but Candy was very particular where food was concerned.

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LESLIE KARST: I first started cooking with my best friend, Nancy, back in elementary school, and one of the first things I remember us preparing was a sauté of tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers. It was amazingly delicious--way better than the vegetables our moms would make--and it wasn't till years later that I realized the reason: we'd cook the veg in an ENTIRE stick of butter. Yikes. But my, oh my, was it good! Maybe I ought to resurrect that recipe....

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MAYA CORRIGAN: Unlike Peg, I never cooked dinner when I was growing up, but I did have the job of making chocolate pudding for dessert once or twice a week. That was before instant pudding was available. My job was to stand over a sauce pan and stir the pudding mix and milk until the mixture finally thickened. That task convinced me that cooking was boring. I didn’t cook any complete meals until I was in grad school, sharing an apartment with a friend. We alternated weeks when one of us cooked and the other cleaned up. Since we were both on a tight budget, our regular meals included mac and cheese, tuna noodle casserole with crushed potato chips on top, and ground beef for cheap stroganoff and sloppy joes. But we had expert advice from my friend's Fannie Farmer Cookbook and my Joy of Cooking.

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CLEO COYLE: Fun topic, Peg! My earliest memories of cooking were acting as the helper to my Aunt Mary, who was born in Italy and lived with our family. She was more of a grandmother, really, and my favorite memories of those years were making Italian cookies for the Christmas holidays and rolling tiny meatballs for her Italian Wedding Soup, which she made nearly every Sunday for the family (no wedding needed)!

Aunt Mary is gone now, but I still have her soup pot and the crinkle dough cutter she brought with her from Italy. I’m already looking forward to Christmas cookie season when I’ll be making cookies from those days, including my version of my aunt’s Glazed Italian Lemon Cookies (Anginetti) and her Italian Bow Tie Cookies (aka Angel’s Wings), pictured below. Click the photo for the recipe…

Click for Cleo's Italian Cookie recipe.

I also have great early memories of making American treats, which included baking chocolate cake with a light bulb courtesy of my treasured Easy Bake Oven. (Check out the vintage versions below....)

Photo credit: By Bradross63 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38602686

Vintage Easy Bake Ovens
(I had the one on the left, LOL!)

And do you all remember Jiffy Pop? I loved popping up the corn with my sister (except for the burnt kernels, the inevitable result of a gas stove and too-thin aluminum pan)! And how about the Pillsbury Chocolate Chip cookies from the refrigerator dough tube, which was pretty darn good uncooked, too (as many of you, no doubt, agree). By the time I was around 10 years old, I was making my own scratch Toll House cookies using the recipe on the Nestle chip bag. To this day, I love experimenting with that classic recipe, and often publish versions in the Coffeehouse Mysteries I write with my husband, Marc. Check out Shot in the Dark (the 18th entry in our series) for my “Mommy and Me” version of the great American chocolate chip cookie. It's amazingly delicious and one of my favorites...

"Mommy & Me Cookies" from Shot in the Dark. 

Click for Cleo's free recipe guide.

GIVEAWAY!

To be entered in this week's drawing
for the 5 terrific mysteries below,
join us in the comments.


What is the first thing you remember cooking?

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Peril on the Page by Margaret Loudon

Crypt Suzette by Maya Corrigan

Two Parts Sugar, One Part Murder by Valerie Burns

Four Leaf Cleaver ARC by Maddie Day

Brewed Awakening by Cleo Coyle

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