What are you making for dinner?

Reservations! I've always loved this old joke, because I truly hate to cook. If anything takes longer to make than it does it eat, I most likely won't be making it. As a kid, my mom served us the typical meat, potatoes, and vegetable dinner, and although I had my favorites, the canned beans were uninspired. Our family didn't have pizza for dinner until I was in high school.  Until reaching college, I never realized how deprived my taste buds were.
I have adapted most of Mom's recipes to appeal more to my own family's tastes, and vegetables are now fresh or frozen....which means I eat a lot more of them!  Mom's homemade potato salad, minus the onions and celery seed, is requested by my kids and even my daughter's boyfriend.  It wil always be known as Gram's Potato Salad.
Most of what I make now has an Italian flare, learned basically through trial and error, although I did discover what a creamy addition ricotta cheese can be in pasta dishes. I learned that from my SWEDISH mother-in-law.  I quite honestly have no recipes from Denmark or Sweden. She embraced being American, and otherwise cooked to please her Italian husband. 
The rest of my culinary triumphs came from recipes that claimed to be ready in 20 minutes or less. That's my kind of food! As it turns out it is my daughter's kind of food as well.  After her first year of dorm life at college, she excitedly moved into an apartment, but the one drawback to being grown up was the cooking.  I sent her off that year packed with her Gram's old cookware, plates, and silverware, along with a small book of recipes that even she couldn't mess up.

She found it hysterical that her entire repetoire of recipes numbered less than a dozen, and despite explicit directions, she still called home everytime she attempted to cook.  In spite of herself, some of her meals were quite good, although she didn't like cooking enough to do it often. Thankfully though, she had one roomie who would feed her on occassion, and her other unfed nights became take out or something simple. (Cereal?!)

Now that she has another hungry person to feed, with an appetite like no one we know, she has grown into the art of cooking, and experiements a bit beyond my tried and true recipes. That's the way it should be. We take what we are taught, incorporate our own likes and dislikes, and create something new based on the old. It is much like this with traditions, customs, and parenting, in addition to cooking.  We all learn from each other and pass on what we know from loved ones, and of course from family.
A warm country hug to all,
Lisa <3