Family Dinner

I had dinner really early tonight. Not six o'clock but five o'clock. Well, I was sooooo hungry having had nothing to eat but a smoothie at 11 am after my workout.

Eating that early reminded me of when I was a kid. My dad, an old time family physician i.e. the kind who made house calls, had office hours every night at 6:30 which meant we had to eat dinner by 5:30 so he could be ready to go downstairs and see his patients, all of which were our friends and neighbors. At the time, I didn't think it weird at all. We got to eat while it was still light out and in the warm weather there was plenty of time before bed to go out in the alley and play. Best of all, I was excused early from Hebrew School which I had to attend two afternoons a week. My dad would make a special trip to bring me home before class was over and it was truly a sweet pleasure to say goodbye and know that I didn't have to sit there for another half hour.

At home, dinner was always three courses. An appetizer of grapefruit, carefully sectioned, or a slice of melon; a simple but tasty roast with vegetables (none of which I ate at that time) then dessert--jello or pudding or Tastykakes direct from the freezer. My mother's culinary creativity didn't really emerge until she fell under the spell of Julia Child, like so many women her age, soon after her first trip to Europe. By that time I was off at college and learning my own way around the kitchen, thanks to the Joy of Cooking, the bible for me and my roommates. I think our favorite meal at that time was beef stroganoff which involved a can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, I remember.

Like my mom, I moved on and graduated from Erma Rombauer. The bookshelves in my current kitchen hold a host of cookbooks, reflecting my culinary progress. There's my very own copy of Julia Child's masterworks, splattered with gravy and splotches of oil, my Silver Palate phase, my Asian period, my Italian obsession and now my vegetarian/natural foods regime. (Guess who led me there?) The one topic you won't find covered in my cookbook collection is dessert. I don't do cakes or pies or sweet things. My mother's recipe for tannies, what our family called butterscotch brownies or blondies, can never be recreated by me. . . except in memory.