What's Cooking?
Cooking was fun in the old days.
My first memory of cooking was attempting to make chocolate fudge. I was ten and babysitting my brother while my parents visited Temple for services. I felt like eating fudge, and none was available anywhere I searched for it. My desire for it was so intense that I knew I would have to make it myself to satisfy that calling.
My fudge attempts were an every Friday night ritual, not too spiritual even though it was Shabbat. Each week was a worse disaster than the week before. The resulting fudge sometimes was so soft it had to be eaten with a spoon or so hard that I used a screwdriver and a hammer to chop out a chunk. But the taste was yummy. I was so happy that I cleaned up the mess I made in the kitchen before my parents came home.
For three months each year, starting when I was about ten, my parents worked late in their toy jobber business during Christmas, and I cooked dinner for my brother and myself every night. My cooking skills got better and better, and my palate expanded.
I always loved exotic foods, ate olives at two years old, relished Chinese cuisine at five, and discovered sauerkraut at around seven.
I felt competent in the kitchen and never shied away from culinary challenges, except lobsters. Shortly after my marriage, our family moved to Providence, R.I., and I decided to make baked stuffed lobsters. It was the early 1960s, and lobsters cost anywhere from $0.99 to $1.99 per pound. The lobsters were cheap enough to experiment with them.
The first line of the recipe stopped me in my tracks. The instructions were to slice the live lobster in half with a sharp knife! Not me — I wasn't doing that. I jumped into my car with the lobsters and my fifteen-month-old son and drove back to the fishmonger. "No problem," he said as he did the required slicing. He rewrapped them, and we went home.
But I was in for another surprise. When I opened the package to start the preparation, to my shock, the lobster's claws and tail were still moving, waving at me. So I waved back and then panicked. I didn't know what to do. My neighbor, a native Rhode Islander, told me that this was normal and not to worry. The lobsters were not in any pain and were dead for sure. After a little while, the waving stopped, and I became used to dealing with them.
My husband, a doctor, had a patient who was a lobster fisherman, and the patient supplied us with eight live three-pound lobsters, so we had a dinner party for three couples and us, one lobster each. I cooked the lobster and made the hors d'oeuvres, the side dishes, and the desserts. Eight lobsters filled the inside of my oven. And they took longer than I had expected, so we ate more hors d'oeuvres, side dishes, and finally, the lobsters.
Hubby poured the before-dinner drinks, mostly hard liquor, the wine during dinner, and the after-dinner drinks. By the end of this party, five of the eight of us took to the floor, groaning from overeating. I was exhausted but upright and triumphant!
When my husband's fiftieth birthday rolled around, I prepared all the food for his party. We invited about forty people, which was more than a dinner party. It was an "event." I hired servers and bartenders, but the cooking was on me. One dish was Shrimp Givetsi, which we had eaten at a restaurant, and the other main dish was a Chinese beef and vegetable melange. I attended a few Chinese cuisine cooking classes and became a quasi-Chinese chef. Here's the recipe for the shrimp dish. It's delicious. It can be prepared with half the butter to ease off some of the fat.
"SHRIMP GIVETSI"
serves four
2 lbs large shrimp (shelled & deveined)
Two sticks butter
1 1/2 c. chopped onion
1/2 c. mushrooms, sliced
1/2 c. scallions, chopped
1 1/2 c. wine
1/2 lb. macaroni shells
Two c. canned tomatoes
1/2 tsp. pepper
Salt
1/2 c. grated Parmesan cheese
In a large saucepan, saute shrimp in 1 stick of butter over moderately high heat until they turn pink. Stir in onion, mushrooms, and scallions. Saute the mixture for 7 minutes or until the vegetables are soft. Transfer shrimp with a slotted spoon to a dish and keep warm. Add wine to the pan and bring to a boil. Stir in macaroni and cook for 15 minutes. You may need to add more wine at this point. Stir in tomatoes with their juice and pepper. Simmer for 5 minutes. Return shrimp to pan and heat. Salt to taste. Sprinkle on cheese and pour the remaining stick of butter, melted. Heat in a 250 deg. oven until deep golden color.
That was then.
Now, as a ninety-year-old, I'm over the kitchen's delights. I live alone, and cooking for one is not too much fun, so I only do it sometimes. I still enjoy cooking once or twice a week, and I make a full recipe, eat one portion, and freeze the rest in portion sizes. My new kitchen enchantment is seeing an already prepared dinner in my freezer.
