To add some humor to our lives I thought you might like to relate a "first time cooking episode or disaster". During our first year of marriage I had to cook on a wood stove. DH would start the fire for me. He was having problems so he threw some kerosene on it and it exploded in his face. Burned off his long eyelashes and that was all the damage, thank goodness. That taught him to not do that again.
I never cooked before getting married - always worked after school, but didn't cook. Married an air force guy at 18, just before Thanksgiving. He was a great cook, however. Christmas came and my parents were coming to spend it with us in a tiny 1 bedroom, 1 bath apt. He got a turkey, said he'd cook it. Well, he got called in to the base about 3 a.m. Told me how to cook the turkey. Didn't tell me you had to take the innards out! 'Nuf said!
Growing up I was the tomboy type. I would rather go 'slop the pigs' then be caught doing girls stuff. I was a Girl Scout and cooked many meals over a campfire but rarely on a stove. When we go married my mom told Art- 'give her a campfire, she will cook you anything; give her a stove and she will burn it.'. I didn't cook the first 6 months we were married - if he was home, he cooked. then I started cooking and he never did again - except to BBQ!
I had no interest in cooking. When we got married, I was given a cookbook, spices, condiments, pots, pans, etc. The first meal I made I used it all & a recipe for fish (he liked fish, I did not). It called for a sauce with 2 tbsps of prepared mustard. I used the mustard in the little can I'd been given and it all looked and smelled wonderful. My husband took a bite & smoke came out of his ears. He tried to be appreciative, but it was not possible to eat it. I didn't know the difference between prepared mustard and powered mustard. It was a long time before I understood what I had done. From then on, my cooking was all downhill. I told my hubby that if he married me because he thought I cooked better than his mother, he'd made a serious mistake. I guess it wasn't my cooking, we were together 53 yrs when he died.
When I first married I would cook and then sit there waiting until he took the first bite. I had done very little cooking and referred to a cook book most of the time. One afternoon he came in with a pheasent for me to cook. He had invited his brother and his wife for dinner. She just happened to be a very good cook and I was scared to death. I got out the trusty cook book and cooked that ugly bird. I still do not know how it tasted but everyone ate it. I had a neighbor who was a newlywed who was a home ec teacher. She was cooking a pot roast in her pressure cooker and burned it. The whole building smelled. After that I didn't feel to bad about my cooking. It's funny I would follow a recipe to the letter and now I change the ingredients and make things my way.
My dad wanted me to "be prepared" for when I got married, so the summer after my senior year in high school, and the following summer, I was responsible for deciding on the meals, buying the ingredients and cooking the meals. My dad was a meat and potatoes guy, so the meals I prepared were that type....no caseroles, etc. My mother was glad for the summers off....but I think they got really tired of chicken fried steak and gravy, home fries and baked beans! I loved that meal! I get nostalgic now when I have chicken fried steaks (I only have them once a month now -I try to be good)..no baked beans with them though. I save those for the ham and potato salad meal (three times a year!) Anyway, my dad didn't give me a budget and I could spend what I wanted, but the roasts and sirloin steaks I got for Mom, Dad and me were not in the budget for newlyweds. We were full time college students with $200 a month, and the rent was $40, gasoline was $40, incidentals were about $30, so there wasn't a lot left for groceries. So, no roasts, steaks, or ham for us. We had Chef BoyRDee pizza (from the box mix), pinto beans, rice, potatoes, hot dogs and the occasional hamburger. It wasn't until after my husband graduated from college and he had a job that I was able to buy the groceries that we grew up with. My grocery budget doubled. My Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook became my friend!
I began to cook when I was 10. My mom had a difficult pregnancy and was in bed most of the year, my step dad was a trucker and gone much of the time. But after my brother was born and mom recovered I stopped cooking. When I married she did it all and did it wonderfull well. Well, now we have this AD thing and I am cooking again. Most of the time I do pretty well, but my "vocabulary" is not terribly wide yet. I have a small book that I write some recipes in, but mostly i get them on line. Yesterday I made dinner and it was pretty awful, but we were hungry I guess. I made sure that what was left "went away".
When Bill and I were married I had never cooked anything. I was an only child and was NOT invited in the kitchen. Anyhow-we put a chicken on the spit of our rotisserie and watched it go around-had no idea how to tell when it was done. Those were the fun days. Don't know why those electric rotisseries went out of style. We lived on the top floor of a large old apartment building. Using any two appliances would blow a fuse (remember those). I would trudge five flights down (no elevator) replace the fuse, trudge back upstairs to find I hadn't unplugged the offending appliance and repeat the whole process. I was five months pregnant at the time. Life was so simple as were our needs.
I couldn't understand why my biscuits didn't rise up like my Mom's. They were always kinda flat. My Mom and my Mother-in-law gave me tips about how much baking powder, etc. I changed the recipe around but nothing worked. One day my Mom was at my house when I was making biscuits. I was rolling the dough with the rolling pin and she said "Are you making pie crust?" Never thought about the fact I was just rolling them too thin. We were mighty happy in those days, though. Now I use Pillsbury frozen biscuits. They look more like my Mom's did.
My mother was a very "adventuresome" cook, so I was used to eating al the innards, etc. prepared in creaative ways. I had never cooked as my dad was in the foreign service, and it was taken care of...but was always interested in food. We had been married two weeks, and I planned a dinner that was a favorite in my family. Now, he was in dental school at this time, so when he sat down to a plate full of braised tongue he looked, ate most of it, then said "I'm looking at tongues all day long...that was very good. Please don't ever fix it again!" Hadn't even occured to me that it was a problem. Turned out he didn't like the brains with scrambled eggs either. ;-)
this wasnt so far in the past..heeheh.. 2 thanksgivings ago i had a huge houseful of family for the big meal. got up at 4am to put turkey in, got going with all the side dishes and 4hrs later, foundout i didnt turn the oven top part on for the turkey.:) thank goodness i made a roast the nite before -everyone was a good sport..this yr the turkey was great!:) divvi
When I was a kid, we ate picked beef tongue frequently as it was cheap and good. I hadn't seen it in the stores for years until we moved to Texas with a large Hispanic population. (My kids ate it when they were kids, but wouldn't now.)
My older sister and her kids came over for supper one evening. We were having leftover tongue for supper. She commented how good the "roast" tasted. Being a pesky younger sister, I said "you're eating tongue". She got up and left the table :-).
PS: She would never eat it as a kid and would go to bed hungry rather than eat it.
My Mom, told this story about when she first married 70 years ago. She was used to cooking and she fixed DH hot blackberries over hot biscuits as their complete meal. This was a mainstay menu at her parental home. DH in true chauvinistic style got up and left the table. He was a meat and potato man.