Lessons from the Family Kitchen - Guest Post!

Hi all - I'm incredibly excited to be able to host my first guest post today!  My dear husband, Ed, wrote this earlier this evening.  He maintains a personal blog - which is only open to family members, but had the idea of letting me cross-post today's musings to Unstructured Bliss.  Of course, I jumped at the chance! I hope you enjoy reading his writing as much as I do!

Nearly twenty years ago, my cousin, Sigrid, had the wonderful idea of creating a family cookbook.  She solicited recipes and anecdotes from everyone on my mom’s side of the family and compiled them into a wonderful book that I still use more often than any of the more than 50 commercial cookbooks in our kitchen.

My own lovely wife has started the process of writing a similar cookbook using recipes from her family.  Hopefully at some point not too far away, we’ll be able to actually devote some real time and effort to it so that we can have matching cookbooks on our shelves.  With so many still young and time-demanding kids on her side of the family, the task of going through recipes and writing down snippets of stories about family gatherings inevitably gets put on the back burner (to keep with our kitchen motif!), but we’ll keep plugging away!

The family cookbook idea has risen to our attention again because of an observation Christine made while fixing her delicious spaghetti sauce this afternoon.  She typically includes 3 links each of hot and sweet Italian sausage, and she did something different today in preparing the sausage that she realized was a big improvement.  But before we get to what that change was, let’s go back to our general theme of lessons from the family kitchen.

Family lore has it that my mom always began the process of cooking a pot roast by cutting off one end of the pot roast before she browned it.  At one point in my parents’ young married life, my dad asked, “Why do you cut the end off the pot roast?”  To which mom answered, “Because that’s what my grandmother always did.”

Turns out that, when mom asked Grandma Straub why she cut off the end of the pot roast, the answer was not some ancient cooking wisdom that one might have expected from a woman who was born at the close of the 19th Century and lived until almost the 21st.  No, the answer was as common-sensical as that same woman who spent her life on a farm raising chickens and selling eggs.  She cut off the end of the pot roast so that it would fit in the pan, which wasn’t big enough to hold the intact roast.

So sometimes, you watch someone do something in the kitchen, and you figure, “Well, that’s how you do it.”  Hardly an earth shattering concept, certainly, but there are probably many things we do that are the result of observational learning, and we simply follow what looks like a good example.

In Christine’s case in cooking sausage for spaghetti sauce, this meant following her parents’ practice of cutting up the links of raw sausage into smaller pieces so that they are then sized appropriately when the sauce is served in individual portions.

But cutting up raw Italian sausage links is a messy, ungainly process that leaves the kitchen area, the relevant knife, and usually the chef’s hands all a mess of raw sausage detritus.

Which leads us to last weekend, when Christine made a wonderful sausage soup from a recipe from my mom.  Having made that last week, Christine realized as she was about to start making spaghetti sauce that rather than cut up the sausage as the first step, she could do what was called for in the sausage soup recipe - cook the links FIRST, and then cut them up into little medallions!

Voila!  We had perfect little sausage medallions in our spaghetti sauce this evening, to go with the always delicious meatballs, which also were produced with a new cooking twist that may serve as a lesson for the next generation of our family.

Someday our children may be fixing meatballs for sauce and they will be asked, why are you putting the egg, bread crumbs, and parmesan cheese into that plastic bag?  Well, it just may be because today Christine had the bright idea of not getting her hands completely coated in raw ground beef to squeeze and mix meatball ingredients, but instead used the freezer bag the thawed meat was already in to serve as a “mixing bag” in which she kneaded all the ingredients and then made the meatballs.