Blog 1
Where do recipes come from, and a recipe for Eggs and Salmon
If I don’t mess this up I’ll use these blogs to write some recipes, kitchen aids, stuff about cooking and meal preparation and the like. There will be slices of life, stories, vignettes, tableaux of my household and ideas and things saved from my collection of poems *Cooking Lessons.* They will also contain some commentary about love, life, writing, travel, the pursuit of happiness, and in general anything that comes into my noggin, that is, in my mind, worth noting.
Where do recipes come from? Grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, friends, restaurants, boating captains, sons, brothers who used to be chefs, daughters in college, nephews, who watch TV cooking shows, newspapers and magazines, and even war movies. In other words, they abound all around us for the mere act of filching them! And as any fiction-writer worth his/her words will tell you, the art of stealing is the best tool a writer can have. And it therefore applies to the art of cooking.
Recipe for Eggs and Salmon
1 onion sliced
1 lb of Lox or any smoked salmon grossly cut in fat slices
1 large (actually overflowing like a fat belly over a tight belt) tablespoon of butter
7 to 9 eggs (calculate 2 a head, and 1 for the pot)
a slash of milk
No salt. The salmon takes care of it …
Fresh ground black pepper to taste
In a large fry pan—may use Teflon—flip in the butter (with a little wrist action for those of you who have an audience and like drama) and then the onion. Once they’re wilted, fling in the cut up salmon. Stir around a bit on a high flame till it warms and gets chummy with the onions. When this tu per tu is accomplished. Beat the eggs in a bowl and add the milk, and then pour this mixture in as a cold shower to dose the illicit fish and onion lovers. Smoosh around to the desired consistency. Sort of how you do scrambled eggs but with an addition—now this could be tricky: for instance my husband likes his eggs runny, hence, his portion comes out first. Keep cooking the rest, and keep serving—and the last person will get a very dry dish. Or do the intelligent thing, and turn off the gas, or remove from the electric plate! thus insuring, everyone gets less to moderately cooked eggs.
Serve with two slices of tomato garnished with small capers on each plate and a fresh loaf of Italian or French bread.
Elly Griffiths: The Man in Black
1 month ago
3 comments:
Nina - Ahhh, your commentary brings back such loving memories of ancestors past. Learning to cook was a challenge for me...especially with the smoosh, splash, pinch and dash! Never knew how anything would come out without those precise measurements! Cathy
Cathy--
I'm from the school of a pinch of this a dash of that, which makes some of my friends nuts-o when I give them recipes. I'm not trying to evade things--cooking isn't an exact science--especially Italian cooking. I'm not, bless her heart, like my husband's Tia Zoila, who used to leave something out or put something in that didn't belong. In fact when I first made piccadillo and my mother-in-law watched me, she said, Who taught you how to make this? I said, Your sister. My mother-in-law just shook her head and said, We had the same Cuban mother, and that's not how she taught us. Of course this discussion took place in Spanish and in my Roman kitchen.
So with fodder like this what would you do? Exactly! I wrote a story and titled it *Tia Zoila* (how original!)but the character in my story isn't really like her--however, the premise is. I really like that story--one of my shortest, only 5 or 6 pages. I wrote it in first person, present tense, with no quotation marks for dialogue--I was experimenting, and I think it worked.
Thanks for your comment.
Keep up the good work.
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