Cooking & Baking
Related: About this forumCollecting Strays at the Thanksgiving Table
'I was so homesick my freshman year of college that my cousins bought me a plane ticket to come home to Nashville for Halloween.
Halloween! It was a fantastic extravagance, the unintended consequence of which was that I really couldnt come home three weeks later for Thanksgiving and then turn right back around and come home for Christmas. I would have to spend Thanksgiving at school.
Though I had some budding college friendships, none of them were close enough that first semester to rate an invitation to someone elses house for the holidays. I went to Sarah Lawrence College, a half-hour north of Manhattan. I lived in a nice dorm that had once been someones house. There was a kitchen downstairs. I figured I could sit tight and wait out the long weekend.
Were I to put a pin in the map of my life and say, here, this is where adulthood began, I would place it on that Thanksgiving weekend in 1981. I was 17 years old. . .
On that freezing holiday weekend when my adult life began, I not only learned to cook, I learned to read. There was no improvisation. If the recipe said two teaspoons of chopped fresh sage, thats what went into the pot. Beat the egg whites for seven minutes? I looked at my watch and went to work.
I did not glance at those instructions, I followed them, so that even now when someone claims they dont know how to cook, I find myself snapping, Do you know how to read? Paying close attention to the text, and realizing that books can save you: Those were the lessons I learned my freshman year of college when school was closed. I then went on to use this newfound understanding to great advantage for the rest of my life.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/well/family/collecting-strays-at-the-thanksgiving-table.html?
Yonnie3
(17,443 posts)and making custard out of it. Some of the custard went in pie crusts I bought, and the rest was just baked in oven dishes. I could have made the pie crusts from scratch, but it would have been difficult in that kitchen. I did make a brief call home to ask Mom if I remembered the process correctly, which I did.
My mother made sure all three of her sons could sew on a button, mend a seam, cook a real dinner, do laundry, iron a shirt and so forth.
Good memories of one long gone.
On the other hand, I still wonder if I ever have achieved adulthood.
csziggy
(34,136 posts)I bought a Cornish hen for my main dish, made stuffing from some stale sandwich bread, and heated up canned vegetables. Given that the dorm only had a toaster oven and a hot plate, that was about as fancy as I could get but it was satisfying that I could make a reasonable meal with such limited resources.
It was a year or so later that I got a copy of "Joy of Cooking" and started getting fancier with my cooking - by then I was out of the dorm and had a real stove with an oven large enough to hold a small turkey and real burners!
blaze
(6,362 posts)As were many of the comments that followed.
Thanks for the link!