Gulf Coast Scallops

Being raised on the Gulf Coast, Scallops were my favorite meal. They were not very popular then and when I would go to the fish market for my dad, the owner would always give me a quart of scallops for free! It was special because only my foster dad and I liked them, so he would cook them just for us!

~ Julie D.

Buttermilk Pancakes

My favorite meal as a child.....now that is hard to narrow down. I consider myself a good eater and I'm afraid I'm not very indiscriminate. I'm going to pick buttermilk pancakes as my favorite meal.

We usually had buttermilk pancakes on Sunday mornings and a glass of orange juice (I'm sure there was something else with the meal, but I can't remember what). Mom would put on "Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass." Dad, not to be outdone, would follow suit with his records or 8-track tapes of Bagpipe music. Gerry and I would then see who could eat the most pancakes, and my poor Dad was lucky to get anything to eat at all.

There are several foods that remind me of people or places. When I smell or taste a pear slice, it reminds me of my Grandma Jerry. She would serve pear halves with cottage cheese on top and place it on a bed of lettuce I think of my mother when I eat a piece of hot apple pie with a wedge of sharp cheddar cheese on the side, and whenever I eat a graham cracker with chocolate frosting in between it reminds me of my Grandma Fifi. It's funny how smells and tastes bring you back to certain place in time.

~ Kal

Chinatown

From the beginning of my memory my mother, father and I had an annual event. Going out to eat.

I don't know that it was any special day because all holidays were celebrated at home with family. It seems to me it was in the spring but it could have been fall. Going out to eat was a really big deal. These yearly pilgrimages always ended up at a Chinese restaurant. My father had a passion for the Chinese and their food and so did I. The hospital I was born in was in Chinatown. I often wondered if it made some sort of a Chinese mark on me. It could be possible.

I loved Chinese food. They had the tiniest dishes with red stuff on one side and the hottest mustard in the world on the other. It seemed to me almost impossible to dip in the red without getting the yellow. It was the only time we drank tea. Little cups that were just my size but too hot to hold. There was intrigue about what you were really eating. Such things as "Bug Juice" and "Birds Nest Soup" were unnerving to a child. I always felt safe with shrimp and almond cookies. You got fortune cookies at the beginning of the meal and almond cookies at the end. They were so good. At some point in the meal, every time we went, one or more of the cooks would come to our table and talk to me in Chinese and stroke my long braids. Mother was always nervous about these encounters. Father just beamed with pride. While I had no clue to what it was all about, just something that happened when we went to Chinese. Maybe they knew where I was born and thought I was one of them. Come to think of it, they still do that to me to this very day.

~ Gin

Beef Stew

I remember the beef stew that my mom used to make. It was delicious! So was the roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy, yum. My mother was a good cook, so when I got married, I wanted her to send me some of her recipes. When she did, I discovered that she didn't always follow the recipe exactly. She never put canned tomatoes in the stew when I was growing up. I imagine that was because we didn't have any tomatoes in our garden and to buy tomatoes would have been expensive. She also didn't make spaghetti the way the recipes showed either. She would use ketchup and bacon, boy it was good, especially as a left-over (pre-microwave), she would fry it up in a pan and we'd eat it all up.

~ Evie

Recipes For Dreamers

When I was a little guy and the snow was still higher than my head, there wasn't any television, very poor radio reception and only an arm load of books in our house. The books that I remember were "Mother Goose", "Snow White and Rose Red" and a "Better Homes and Garden Cook Book". I suppose those were the books that I first learned to read and I was familiar with things like a half cup of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla long before I started to school and I still know my nursery rhymes pretty well.

The really neat thing about the cookbook was that it had colored pictures of the finished recipies. I used to pour over that book just like it was a Christmas catalog. My favorites were the little mint patties (white, green and pink) and the pineapple upside down cake (pineapple rounds encrusted with brown sugar). Those delicacies didn't come out of the kitchen very often, but it was a special day when they did. In the meantime, there were many rainy days when my imagination enjoyed quite a feast, reading and re-reading my mother's cook book.


~MK