Watery Tomato Sauce, Inedible Soup and the Faux Communion Wafer

Watery Tomato Sauce And Inedible Soup

My childhood and food wasn’t all rainbows and four star restaurants – like all of yours have been. My Dad had this thing about watery tomato sauce (well, I can understand that). Thinking back, my Dad had a thing about many things. I believe that he was uncertain of himself to some degree and, consequently, tried to govern the household through bluster and yelling. Not all the time, but maybe more than I felt necessary. I’m still trying to understand my Dad. Anyway, back to the watery tomato sauce! Dad’s need to hide his insecurities took the form of an out of proportion reaction to anything that might displease him. I remember one, actually more than one, family dinner where he yelled at my mother because the tomato sauce was watery and threw his plate full of spaghetti and watery tomato sauce at the wall. Watery tomato sauce is one thing, throwing it at the wall is altogether another. See, when a family eats together you make memories, and psychiatrists bills, which last a lifetime. If you’re a father – DON’T EVER DO THAT! It scares the shit out of a kid and as written here, that child will always remember it. In those memories you will be a bit diminished and a bit of our love for you will be lost by such actions. I vaguely remember that he grilled, but even those memories are very, very faint. He was a salesman and because of his job, and the fact that he loved eating, he ate in restaurants a lot and he made a point of taking our family to restaurants more often than other families may have gone.


The fact that Dad ate a lot in restaurants is possibly, along with the family being together for meals, another clue as to my obsession, my attitude and my approach to cooking. He was perhaps, more obsessive than passionate about his food, especially when it came to dining out. Perhaps I did pick up this passion - or the obsession. Perhaps I’m not entirely clear where the line is drawn between the two.

Dad took his family out to eat at restaurants where we found cloth tablecloths, multi-piece place settings and candles as compared to a slice of pizza on a paper plate. We learned table manners, the fact that there were several courses, how to order, we dressed up in sport coats and sometimes ties, I probably learned which fork to use when (though I can’t remember that to this day and Bonnie continues to make fun of me for it). My parents and one of my mother’s sisters were married in different years, but within days of one another. I remember the absolute HONOR AND THRILL that my cousin Claudia and I felt when we, being the eldest children; were invited to join them at their wedding anniversary dinners at the Avon Old Farms restaurant (looking at their website it is not as I remember it). With these restaurant meals I learned that there was a world of food out there that I had could never have dreamt of. It being the 1950’s and 60’s in central Connecticut it was a relatively small world of food, but certainly larger than I would have ever known if Dad hadn’t taken us out. Not to say that we didn’t go to pizza joints and McDonald’s too, not to say that all of Dad’s instruction regarding restaurant behavior could be considered normal and certainly not to say that there have been some pretty interesting occurrences that the Grunwald family experienced in restaurants.

Dad’s responsibilities to the family excluded virtually all domestic tasks (Hey! It was the 50’s!) with the exception of mowing the lawn and eventually mom ended up with that chore too. However, I have a single, emblazoned on my psyche forever, memory of Dad ‘cooking’, doing something with Campbell’s Condensed Soup. Mom was out Christmas shopping. I vividly remember my brother and me in the late December afternoon darkness laying on the linoleum floor of a multi-family house that my Dad’s parents owned, sharing it with Mom and Dad (much to my Mom’s joy) and looking through the Christmas toy catalogs that came in the mail. What could possibly be more wonderful to a kid at Christmas time than a toy catalog?

Dinner time. Oh my God, Mom’s not home and we have to eat. She’s not Home! We’ll never eat!! Not to worry, Dad had made us soup for dinner. In making this soup, which required only the addition of water or milk and heat, he had done something that made it absolutely inedible. Beyond the grave foul. To this day I can’t imagine how he took something so very simple and turned it into a disaster. My brother and I tasted one small spoonful each and refused to eat any more. The bluster and yelling of those insecure in the command position, “You two just eat that soup! There’s nothing wrong with it and that’s all that you’re getting for dinner!” I think that I was about four years old, my brother two years younger – and, at that moment in time we were Motherless, certain that we would never see our mother again and that we would have to eat dishes as foul as this soup until were old men. So, we started crying. Not loud and bawling, simply the low mewling whimpers of motherless innocents condemned to slaughter. “Eat that soup now!!!” Dad was not at all pleased, orders were not being followed. This was just before Christmas. Can you imagine how bad this soup tasted that we refused to eat it, even though the probability of Dad’s reporting this uprising to Santa would result in our finding no presents for us under the Christmas tree? The Christmas Angel arrived in the guise of my mother. All was set right with the world, edible food was brought forth and served and presents were found under the tree on Christmas morning. Maybe Dad asked Santa to taste his soup.

One of Mom’s Recipes
No, not the chopped ham and pickle recipe – I’ll keep working on that. This is my mom’s recipe for Angel Wings (in Polish, Chrosciki). It’s a nice little bit of light, thin and flakey dough, fried and dusted with confectioners sugar. Very nice.
I suspect that you can apply this recipe’s origin to all of the eastern European countries and beyond. Locales get so territorial about recipes, but when you dig around you find that very few places exclusively developed a particular dish. Regional differences- absolutely. But as for the origination point I’ll just keep wondering.
Mom probably sent this to me while I was in college, sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s. She knew that I had begun to love cooking and she was pleased. Mom did well with this dish. Of course, as she got older, they were store bought and certainly not as good. I tend to associate these with Christmas and Easter – Holy Days – Angel’s Wings – makes sense to me. For all of you out there that have that proverbial drawer full of Grandma’s recipes don’t you ever throw them away. You have to pass them down.
I don’t believe that Mom knew where cooking for someone could lead. I take that back, she probably did as the fact is as old as time itself. Was she encouraging me?



Easter’s Faux Communion Wafer And Hard Boiled Eggs

My obsession or, my passion regarding food and cooking did not come from Mom or Dad’s parents. Hell, some of these folks had died long before I was even born. However, there was my Dad’s mother. Ah, yes, the grandmother who seldom, if ever, raised her voice to her grandchildren in anger or, for that matter, took any interest in the lives of her grandchildren. Oh, she was there for our First Holy Communion, our Confirmation and our High School graduations, but beyond physically being there she expressed virtually no interest in us. To this day I remember that what she also had no interest in cooking.

I’m certain that my Dad’s ‘love’ of cooking, altogether different from eating, was instilled by his mother’s attitude towards it. I, to this day, want the ‘television portrait’ of a grandmother. We’ve all seen the television commercials, and I know that all of you out there except me actually have grandmothers cooking wonderful dinners, baking pies, cakes and cookies, teaching the grandchildren how to cook, passing on the age old family recipes. All the while grandmother laughing, smiling, beaming a wonderful smile at her grandchildren and the sun shining through spotless/streakless windows while bluebirds trill the theme from ‘Snow White’. It’s a wonderful picture, and I know that every one of those children in the commercial, and in real life, will grow up with a love of cooking - maybe a serial murderer too, but with a love of cooking. My grandmother, on the other hand, didn’t come anywhere close to that commercial. I never saw her cook anything - maybe hardboiled eggs (not deviled eggs, just plain old hard boiled in the shell) during the Easter holidays - but those could have been done by someone else.

OK, those memories were supposed to have been buried very deeply in an unmarked grave, yet here they are, back to haunt me – The Communion Wafer and The Easter Hard Boiled Eggs At The Grandparents. At Easter time all of the aunts, uncles and grandchildren would gather at my paternal grandparents’ house to celebrate the holiday. Being ethnic, immigrants and Polish Roman Catholic, there was some kind of symbolic gesture, still unknown to me, that was manifested by eating a ‘faux’ communion wafer and a peeled, hardboiled egg.

The thought of having to deal with the wafer left me in a cold sweat. We gathered together and my grandfather said a prayer, we said Amen and he came to each of us breaking off an index card sized portion of this wafer and placing it on our extended tongue. It had to have been a faux wafer, couldn’t have been the real deal because a Priest wasn’t holding it. In the 1950’s it had been drilled into us, actually beaten into us in some cases, in our religious classes that the ‘Body of Christ’ (I am not making this up) could only be handled by the Priests. And when it was placed upon your tongue and your tongue drawn back into your mouth, you could not, under any circumstances, chew this wafer. You had to let it sit on your tongue until it dissolved. The nuns had made it absolutely, and in many instances painfully, clear to us that to chew this wafer was to disrespect God and invite the eternal fires of Hell upon our souls. The problem was that when this wafer was placed upon your tongue it immediately sucked every single last drop of moisture from your mouth. I’m certain that it had plans on desiccating your entire body, but it began its dastardly work in your mouth. I suspect that the ancient Egyptians used communion wafers in their mummification practices. As this wafer adhered itself to the surface of your tongue and upper palate you found yourself unable to breath, you could not swallow, your airway began to close, your vision was tunneling and there was a ringing in your ears – you knew that death was reaching out his bony hand to grasp you and take you. You had a choice. You could chew this wafer and death would withdraw, for the moment, to be replaced at a later date with the eternal fires of hell - or you could let the wafer complete its nasty work, die and immediately enter Heaven. Every kid that I knew chose to chew and postpone the inevitable. And that was exactly what I did; surreptitiously, gumming it, moving my jaw in tiny increments until I had broken its grip and was able to breath again.

As bad as the wafer was, for me, the hardboiled egg was much, much worse. The battle with the wafer left me exhausted, covered in the sweat of battle and ready to leave the field. And yet the battle was only half played out. The hardboiled egg slowly rose on the horizon, soon dominating what had been my view of earth and sky, eliminating any hope of escape, replacing my exhaustion from the Wafer War with fear of that battle soon to come. All the Easter revelers were expected to say a prayer in unison and at the end of that prayer to eat a portion of a hardboiled egg. As the end of the prayer approached the monster fear took me: I broke into a sweat, nearly peed in my pants, was trembling, and was ready to jump out a window.
For, as a kid, I could not take a bite of this egg without gagging as if I were about to die (maybe this speaks of the relationship that I perceive religion and I to have). Gagging with a force that should have given me immediate esophageal bleeding, gagging to the point where tears are streaming from my eyes and I’m rolling on the floor unable to breath. The only thought in my mind was that this hardboiled egg sitting in my mouth, clogging my throat and scouring my nostrils with its scent had the foulest flavor I could ever have imagined. The colors and textures played their parts too. The rubbery, stained, dirty looking white and the powdery grey-green-looks like death of the yolk. How did they get the eggs to look this ugly? My hardboiled eggs don’t look like this. I knew full well that if I were to attempt to swallow this I would throw it back up. And yet, that’s what my parents are demanding that I do – swallow it! My mother saying, “Please Honey. Just try to eat a little of it”. Eat a little????? It was in my mouth and throat and God help me my stomach and I was near death. How could she hate me this much? How could I eat the potato salad with these eggs and love it? What had I done to offend her to this degree? Meanwhile all the relatives are eyeing - not me - but my parents, wondering where they went wrong raising a Polish lad that couldn’t eat hardboiled egg that manifested who knows what. After much gagging and heaving on my part I managed to palm the slimy remnants and close my hand around them (as gross as that may seem it’s not as gross as swallowing this mess), moving towards the bathroom as quickly as possible, but no so fast as to attract attention. With the bathroom door closed I furiously washed my hands and mouth. Returning to the family group my thoughts weren’t of Easter, redemption and rebirth; but only the fact that I wouldn’t have to go through this again for another year.

So, that’s what grandma cooked, maybe – hardboiled Easter eggs. Maybe. She had other culinary talents though. Whenever her grandchildren were at her home we were offered – consistently – are you ready? Flat, room temperature ginger ale and some absolutely nondescript, stale, store bought cookie. A cookie so dry that it crumbled like Dust Bowl Dirt, if you had the nerve to bite into it. Every single time that we visited her. Not much of a culinary legacy Grammy. Where’s June Cleaver or Fannie Farmer when you need them?

Next Week: The Parents Make Bread and Polio, Strawberry Shortcake and Uneaten Green Peas

A Brief Bio, A Great Mom and Dad and Jean's Potato Salad

A Brief Bio and A Great Mom and Dad

Very simply, my life’s journey began in central Connecticut in 1950. A baby boomer with, eventually, two brothers and parents who loved us very much and fed us three meals a day all the days that we lived together. Dad taught us to ride bicycles and play baseball and football, Dad and Mom took us car camping throughout New England and taught their three sons to behave well enough to eat in restaurants without causing a scene – most of the time. The life that I was living was, as far as I knew then, the same life that all of us kids were living at that time; school, church, cap guns, marbles, baseball cards, sneakers, skinned knees and cut fingers, “please don’t tell Dad”, flavor straws, every other week I dropped and broke that damned fragile glass lined thermos bottle that was in our metal ‘Davy Crockett’ lunch boxes, orangeade for special parties at school, “I just bought those pants for you and ALREADY you tore a hole in the knee!?!?!?!?”. We all came to know that it wasn’t the same for all of us and, yes, there were dark days too. But throughout it all I didn’t have a thought in the world about cooking – though I did love to eat. As a child I kept hoping that my few extra pounds and bubble butt that had my mother searching through the pants racks in the Husky Boy Clothing Section of Raphael’s Department Store in New Britain was caused by a glandular condition and would go away. I still have that glandular condition, and I’m large boned.

What was it in my upbringing that started the cooking thing? I honestly don’t know. There must have been something there. I know why I started cooking – I had to eat while I was in college, but it’s not that simple (found out about the cooking/sex thing soon after) but survival isn’t enough of a reason to go to the lengths that I do when it comes to cooking. Do I remember anything about growing up in that tiny ranch house with two brothers, Mom and Dad that would set me on the cooking course? Nope. Of course there are a million memories, but what I remember most isn’t about the cooking and food. What I remember most is that Mom and Dad would do anything, make an extraordinary effort, for their children. Not to the point of spoiling us, though some might argue that, but just whatever we needed to “do” things:
The special type of paint for the school project, encouraging us with the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, making sure that we found the right baseball glove and that it fit, Mom didn’t tell Dad every incident that occurred, Dad played catch with us, taught us the rudiments of batting a baseball, had us rake leaves and mow the lawn (though we couldn’t mow it HIS way), they went to our little league games and PTA meetings and Parent Teacher Conferences and they encouraged and praised our efforts – that type of “do”. Thinking back, I would stay awake the nights of the parent/teacher conferences, waiting for my parents to come home. I wanted to be able to run from the house as quickly as possible if the teacher told them about everything I did at school.
The other strong memory is that there were always lots of books in the house: The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Life Magazine, money to buy books at the school book fairs, Weekly Reader, newspapers, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and honest to God real hardbound books that were not condensed. Only a few years ago I purchased a used copy of a book that I signed out at our town library many times, ‘Mystery At Long Barrow House’, by Nancy Faulkner. It was interesting to read it again to get some idea of the child that I was. While this book had little to do with food it was heavy on Christmas, so there is that connection – I love Christmas time.
I don’t remember Mom or Dad reading a lot while we were kids, maybe they did and I missed it; at one point in his life Dad said that he could read the first and last sentence in a book and know the story (maybe he was right), I don’t remember Mom reading much then, but she reads a lot now. They did read to us, taught us to treasure books and instilled the proverbial life long love of reading in all of their sons.
Maybe the most important memory was that we did a lot of things together as a family – a lot of yelling and screaming, but done together. Together things like all of us sitting down at the table for the meal, all of us at the same time, virtually every day. As I write this, I’m seeing shimmerings of the beginning of my wanting to cook for people in the ‘togetherness’ aspect of my childhood. We did go car camping, take Sunday Drives, visit the relatives, go to drive-in movies (as Roman Catholics we were required to see ‘The Ten Commandments’ and ‘The Robe’) – all of this together as a family – whether we wanted to or not. Was this togetherness all sweetness and light? Of course not, but nothing tabloid horrendous, rip your soul open forever, either.



Paella on the Cape with the addition of Linguica from New Bedford




Jean’s Chopped Ham & Pickle And Potato Salad

I usually didn’t stand by Mom’s side as she cooked. She cooked nothing spectacular in the 1950’s, but there are two dishes that are absolutely memorable to me, dishes that I did watch her as she prepared them – her ‘chopped ham and pickle’ and her ‘potato salad’. Mom was THE cook in the house. That’s the way it worked in the 1950’s. I don’t think that Dad knew how to turn the stove on. From Mom all culinary delights flowed. God, I can still taste those two dishes, still see her making them, ‘MOM’S CHOPPED HAM AND PICKLE’ and ‘MOM’S POTATO SALAD’! Those mere words set me salivating. Dishes that I still work to replicate (I’m 99% there on the potato salad). Maybe it’s that question of context. The chopped ham and pickle was made of: ham, veal loaf, pickles, mayonnaise, God knows what else if anything else. Best served on fresh, seeded rye bread. Bonnie had never even heard of ‘veal loaf’ when I first mentioned it. It’s available in central Connecticut, actually many locations, but you have to find the ‘right’ kind of neighborhood to get the best, one of my favorite stores, Illg’s, Chalfont, Pennsylvania, make their own.
Chopped ham and pickle was a staple of my childhood and Mom made it for me while I was in college and continued to make it until the day that she was no longer able to. One of my great childhood memories was THE WAY that mom made it – an old cast iron meat grinder was clamped to the kitchen counter or the table. All the ingredients, no silly not the mayo, were placed in the hopper with a practiced hand and steadily, not quickly, ground together to the perfect consistency – not too mushy – not too firm. The individual ingredients still recognizable in this wonderfully colored, green, pink, reddish mélange. The taste is the taste of Mom’s chopped ham and pickle salad. No one ingredient overwhelms or stands out, they all work together for this meaty-smoky-salty-sweet-sour-creamy taste with a consistency of a good coarse pâté. Despite the fact that Mom served it year round, I shall always associate it with summer winds, blue skies, white clouds and sunshine.
I don’t even remember if I got to turn the crank of the meat grinder, it doesn’t matter whether I did or not, the picture in my mind and the memory of the tastes is satisfaction enough.
I keep trying to replicate Mom’s potato salad and I have not – yet – I’m close. I know potato salad is a very personalized taste. Green peppers or no green peppers, onions or no onions, how much mayo (Please God don’t tell me that you use Miracle Whip. If you’re going to use the spawn of the devil’s concoction Miracle Whip – which is fake mayonnaise with lots of sugar - spread it on your Spam sandwich), hardboiled eggs? Absolutely! Creating this dish didn’t require such accoutrements as the meat grinder. It was a simple, thin aluminum pot to boil the potatoes, another aluminum pot with a black, chipped, Bakelite handle to boil the eggs in, an old white ceramic bowl to mix it in and a wonderful knife with a carbon steel blade that had taken on a black patina from years of use to prep the ingredients. In Mom’s potato salad the potato pieces were small but, still distinct. They created a chunky and creamy wonder. There was the hardboiled eggs, again small pieces, no onions, no green peppers, there was celery, potatoes and the mayonnaise. Again – HEAVEN. The seasonings? As I remember, simply salt and pepper. Creamy potatoes with a wonderful egg sauce.
I consider my childhood absolutely wonderful if for no other reason than the constants that were Mom’s Chopped Ham and Pickle and the Potato Salad.
When Mom dies I want to have a huge oval sign placed above her grave. Not the grave monument of cold, hard lifeless stone, but a brilliant sign with gold gilt letters, a deep forest green background and a bright, shiny, red border proclaiming,

JEAN GRUNWALD’S
CHOPPED HAM & PICKLE
AND POTATO SALAD
THE BEST!

A sign proclaiming that through these dishes, and so many other things, her warmth and love will continue.

Of course, I also consider my childhood to have been absolutely wonderful because one fine day, on the bus to Kindergarten, Sandy and I ducked down behind the seatback in front of us and kissed (yes, at age 5 or so, I know that with today’s PC nuttiness I’d be in jail). I believe that we were caught by the bus driver and reported but I don’t remember the punishment, so it couldn’t have been bad or else the kiss was spectacular. I prefer to think that the kiss was spectacular. A kiss as spectacular as Mom’s chopped ham and pickle and potato salad.


My initial thought regarding the presentation of the dinner diaries in this blog was to do so in the same manner I’ve done in the manuscript; they’d make their appearance at the proper point in time. However, I cooked a nice, for the most part as you’ll see, dinner this weekend in honor of a friends birthday. And so, I’ve decided to present this diary out of its proper place in time. For those of you that know me you can appreciate the struggle that my thoughts waged in presenting this out of order. The dinner diaries are now on the computer rather than being handwritten. If I handwrote them, you wouldn’t be able to read them. By the way, I plan on presenting new postings to The Cooking and Memoirs of a Curmudgeon Chef on a weekly basis. That’s the plan today, we’ll see about tomorrow.

Dinner Diary August 15, 2009

B., A., BB and me

Appetizers

- Baguette
- Green grapes
- Asagio and Fontina cheeses
- THAI CURRY SAUCE SHRIMP CAKES ON SEAWEED SALALD: the shrimp was processed in a food processor until it could be molded into cakes. It was mixed with scallions, green and yellow peppers, salt and Red Thai Curry Sauce. The cakes were then pan sautéed in peanut oil. The seaweed salad was courtesy of one of our neighborhood sushi restaurants, Ota Ya.

- PAN SEARED DRY SCALLOPS SERVED OVER A BACON, CORN, TOMATO CREAM SAUCE: The sauce also contained pan sautéed shallots and fresh basil for seasoning. Very easy to make; dice and cook the bacon. When’s it’s done put it on some paper towels to drain, reserve some of the bacon fat in the skillet ad sauté the diced shallots, add the cream, bring just to a boil and turn the heat off. Add corn cut from the cob and chopped tomatoes (drained). Cover and keep warm. Pan sear the scallops in butter. Add the bacon and chopped basil to the corn tomato mix. Plate. Put a scallop atop the sauce and serve.

Soup

- TOMATO LIME GAZPACHO: Tomatoes, green peppers, cucumbers, red onion salt and pepper and enough lime juice so that it has a distinct, but not overwhelming taste of lime. A portion of the mixture was pureed in the blender with a little chicken stock and the diced vegetables were added to this.

Salad

- ONE OF DAVE'S SLAWS: Shredded red cabbage, carrots and Granny Smith apples with walnuts. The dressing was cider vinegar vinaigrette seasoned with smoked paprika and honey.

Entrée

- BARBEQUED BONE-IN COUNTRY PORK RIBS FROM ELY'S: Ely’s has the best ribs. Dry rub using salt, brown sugar, dry mustard, paprika and smoked paprika. Barbeque sauce from one of Craig Claiborne’s New York Times cookbooks. I kinda cheat with this in that I put the rubbed ribs in a tightly sealed roasting pan with a little beer in it and leave it in the oven at 300° for about an hour and a half to two hours; until the meat can easily be pierced with a fork. Then it’s on the grill with the sauce.

- B. is a dedicated vegetarian and I made him a serving of pasta with a basil pesto sauce.


Accompaniments

- JEAN'S POTATO SALAD: One of the classic recipes. Peeled russet potatoes, bacon, onions sautéed in bacon fat and celery. Seasoned with mayo, a little cider vinegar and a little tarragon and mixed with mashed hard-boiled eggs. Honestly, I don’t recall that Jean ever added bacon to her potato salad.

Dessert

- A PEACH SOMETHING WITH VANILLA ICE CREAM: Pit and peel the peaches. Sauté them in butter, brown sugar, vanilla flavored rum, a little lemon juice and a dash of salt. Make spoon bread dough and bake it. I thickened the sauce with a little arrowroot.


The Autopsy Report

A belated birthday dinner for A. As to be expected with some of our oldest friends we had a nice evening. Bonnie made the house and table setting quite beautiful. However, I absolutely blew the peach dessert. In an effort to get things done, never enough time, I made the peach filling earlier in the day. When I topped it with the spoon bread dough the filling was room temperature. A. kept saying, “The filling has to be hot”. I should listen more often than I do. The result of the room temperature filling was dough topping that was nicely crusted on top and absolutely raw on its underside. I ended up scraping the spoon bread dough off of the peaches and serving the filling with the ice cream. It wasn’t bad, but it most certainly wasn’t what I had in mind.
Looking at the menu a little more closely I wonder what the shrimp cakes are doing on the menu. The rest of the menu says United States of America Summer; plain old grilled shrimp might have been a better idea.
I had a lot of possibilities for the menu, but when the ribs were selected it had to be slaw and potato salad. A classic summer meal on a hot summer eve.

Next week: Watery Tomato Sauce, Inedible Soup and the Faux Communion Wafer Battle

AND SO THE STORY BEGINS ..............



The First Time He Cooked Her Dinner

In the summer of 1969 Ellen and I were both in Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design. We had finished our freshman year and the both of us were staying in the city for the summer rather than going back home. Our timing getting out of work for the day was such that we always ended up walking together on our way home. We were friends and enjoyed talking with each other on these walks home. We would discuss our day, friends, music, the world and, it being the 60’s, how we were going to change the world.

At this point I was living by myself in a small apartment, a couple of rooms in what had been a mansion in better days and like much of the off-campus student housing, it had been partitioned into a rabbit warren maze of apartments. I remember what the interior of those apartments looked like: a slab of foam instead of a mattress, day-glow rock concert posters on the walls (if you were really cool a poster of the ‘Super Session’ album cover), masonry block shelving, tiny kitchens with virtually no cabinets, the secondhand couch covered with an ‘India Print’ thin cotton spread, with luck an old table and mismatched chairs, incense and incense holders, and always - the iconic stereo (Marantz, Phillips, AR, Design Research components) and the record collection. Ah, and the bathrooms. Not something to linger in, it held a toilet that you used trying not to think of it, an age stained sink and the metal shower that always was rusting at the base. I recall that women’s apartments always looked more inviting: cleaner with freshly washed bed sheets.
One soft early summer evening on our walk home, with no malice or forethought on my part, I said, “Why don’t you come to my place and I’ll make us dinner”. I’ve always wondered what possessed me to say that. Prior to that monumental moment in time I had never made dinner for anyone other than myself. At the time I believe that my repertoire consisted of some kind of steak, frozen green peas and one of those ‘Uncle Ben’s’ flavored rice dishes (my memory, flawed though it may be, remembers these as pretty tasty). She looked at me incredulously and said, “You can actually cook dinner for the both of us? Really? You’re not going to just order pizza?” My response, “No problem, I like to cook.” We got a bottle of wine from ‘Rozz and Jack’s’ before we got to my place (Rozz and Jack, God bless their souls, owned a dingy hole in the wall liquor store and would sell liquor to you without an ID if you weren’t picky about the label, the price or falling down drunk). In the fashion of those times the wine was probably Lancer’s, Blue Nun or Mateus (red or white – I hope that I was savvy enough to get the red). I like to think that even at the moment of creation of my cooking odyssey I would select a real wine rather than Boone’s Farm.
Ellen was thrilled that someone, me, was actually cooking her dinner. She told me how really nice it was for me to do this. She asked where I learned to cook (with the exception of the steak, the other two ‘courses’ had cooking instructions on their containers – that’s where I learned to cook the meal). The meal was nicely done. I am assuming this because I don’t remember it as a disaster. I mean really, it wasn’t a hard menu to master. I don’t remember the detail of the meal other than it was a nice little, end of day, relaxing, domestic scene, the soft summer evening melting into night.
As I started cleaning up she came up to me, put her arms around me and with a twinkle in her eyes that I will never forget said, “That was sooooo nice of you. None of the guys that I know have ever cooked me dinner. Now ……. . her, kissing me so softly……….. what can I do for you?” At that stop the earth moment in time I believe that I began to comprehend the full import of knowledge that caused Archimedes to leap from his bathtub and run naked through the streets shouting, “Eureka!” and I began to understand the full import and power of cooking and food.
It really was the start of it all. The proverbial ‘click’. It was that moment when all the gears and all the planets were in the right placement. It was that moment when all the memories and tastes of food events past and the knowledge that this was something that was going to carry into my future took the first beautiful step. Did I know the depth of it? Of course not, but I did feel that ‘click’, that feeling of something discovered.
Men, women! See, if you perform an act based in sincerity, without expectation of reward, you may, as the Bible says, get paid back tenfold. Actually, I don’t think that the Bible had my particular experience in mind with that statement. When you have cooked for the sheer joy of cooking and been paid back in a most unexpected and wonderful manner, not necessarily sex, please kneel and ask the Lord to bless me for putting you on this path. I’m curious to see what the Lord’s response to your requesting a benediction for me, in this particular regard will be – better make it just a short silent prayer for the salvation of my soul. Have I and my cooking traveled beyond the whole ‘cooking yields sex’ thing? Absolutely, but it’s sure nice to remember where it all started.

Rose hips from the Cape about to become
Rose Hip Jelly


Who The Hell Is This Guy?

What is this book about? So what, so what, with all this love of cooking? Who the hell is Dave Grunwald? Dave Grunwald, me, I am an architect, I have built homes with my own two hands (draft it up at night and go out and hammer the wood together in the day with Jim and Paul), I have been a real estate developer, I’ve designed and made custom furniture and I am a musician (a musician, not a drummer – old joke). But, more constant than anything else I have always been a cook. This book is an orderly ramble, but a ramble nonetheless, through my life as defined by my cooking and food. It is the tales of those food memories that are so much a part of my life. It is about my ‘Dinner Diary’: the diaries of menus and dinners that I have kept since 1983. It’s about me getting so wrapped up in cooking and food that I can relate virtually all of my life to it – and yet it’s not how I make my living. This, my, cooking and food has represented all aspects of my life; survival, humor, sorrow, failure, achievement, tradition, family, need, friends – and love. Nothing, absolutely nothing in my life, has been as constant as my love of cooking and food.
Ask anybody who has ever cooked anything and cared about it and they will tell of the ‘rush’ of bringing it to the table and having this dish, this meal, oooh’d and aaaah’d over by the seated ones. You get addicted to it. It is a magnificent obsession, a compulsion, the core of me.
The narrative, the food stories describe the incidents of my life that are related, in some cases obliquely, to food and the cooking journey: good food, bad food, dinners served by friends, crap served by people who said they were my friends but weren’t if they served me crap, good and bad and horrendous restaurants, absolutely wondrous food stores, old ladies selling the best jams and jellies in the world by the side of the road from a shack.
My love of cooking and my innate obsessive compulsiveness led me to keep the ‘Dinner Diaries’ – a diary that I started in 1983 that tells the stories of the meals that I’ve cooked, the friends and family that I’ve shared them with, what went right and what went wrong, how I’d do things the next time and our musings on those things that were so important in our lives at that moment .
I enjoy journeying through these diaries and seeing the flow of people in and out of my life, how the menus shift, or remain the same, based on the times, the seasons, the weather, whether or not we had any money, the amount of time that I could give to the meal, the repeat recipes, the times when I wasn’t cooking as often as other times, the friends that have been, or once were, major fixtures in my life. How the remembrance of a particular dish or menu is affected by the mood of that moment in time in which it occurs – the context of the moment. I’m sorry that I didn’t start the diaries when I started cooking in college in the late 1960’s. It would be nice to remember with some degree of accuracy (I can’t even begin to tell you what I can’t remember from the 60’s and 70’s) many of the menus and friends that it all started with but, hey! How did I know that I was going to LOVE cooking as much as I do!

Next week ...... A brief bio of a great Mom and Dad and Jean's chopped ham and pickle and potato salad