Lessons from my Mom's Kitchen: Staples

When it comes to pearls of wisdom that my mom bestowed on me, one of the best was to never try a new dish when company was coming over. It makes sense - because Murphy's Law is a real thing. Probability of errors or just plain ol' disaster increases in circumstances when I'd like to deliver perfection.

Mom repeated this wisdom often during my childhood on through to adulthood. And I have by and large ignored it. Which makes me the town idiot.

Lessons from my Mom's Kitchen: The Casserole

My mom has a recipe library. Recipes collected from friends and magazines and cookbooks over the past thirty-five years since she married my dad. She credits recipes with helping her take the leap from "heating soup, pouring cereal, or making a sandwich" to feeling at home and inspired in the kitchen. The recipe library is organized, every food category within easy reach.

I grew up in that kitchen with those recipes - we enjoyed executing what others had tested to publishable perfection. Take baking, which is more science than art ... recipes ensure that breads rise and cookies hold together properly. When I'm entertaining, I have confidence in trying something new when I have a trusted recipe source to lean on. We like recipes.

But then there was the moment my mom discovered a world apart from recipes - a world called casseroles.

Before I tell you about this moment, I think the term "casserole" has fallen out of vogue in the last decade or so and deserves a reintroduction. The etymology is from the French word for saucepan. The modern concept of "casserole" was developed in the late 1800s to describe a savory mixture of rice and meats, and evolved to describe a one-dish meal that became popular in America in the 1950s. What I'm saying is it's part of our American heritage and we should not dismiss it as plain jane kitchen fare.

So back to my mom's kitchen...

Lessons from my Mom's Kitchen: Mise en place

My mom is a cosmopolitan soul residing in a SoCal woman's body. Her Southern accent sends my imagination sweeping into a Carolina dining room or a day at the races in Virginia. While she doesn't strickly speaking speak French, to hear her pronounce most words en francais is to assume she spent years abroad in Paris. And together our varieties of British dialects, culled from hours of BBC TV and movies, call to mind a tea room fit for a Queen's service. Somewhere between her Southern gentility, French connection, and English orderliness is my mother's commitment to mise en place, putting everything in it's place. In her kitchen this means washing, chopping, measuring and otherwise prepping ingredients for a dish so that the execution of it is fairly seemless. It also extends to setting the table the night before or morning of a dinner party, setting out serving dishes and making sure the bathroom is neat so there isn't a flurry of "last-minuteness".  These are habits I'm thankful were ingrained early on - it comes as second nature to me in my own home and makes hosting much, much easier.

Closing Up Summer@No41

According to the calendar, fall doesn't start for another few weeks but in my world that season is measured more by the start of the school term and the word "September" than the weather or calendar date. Summer@No41 brought with it some truly memorable evenings and the milestone of 100 guests at the table.

With Labor Day behind us, the labors of the fall are in full swing. And my coping methods for stress are kicking in. We all have coping methods...the fact that it's a widely understood word pairing proves it. I wish my method was the practiced ability to hunker down with extreme focus and get the thing done so as to desist coping and move on to the next thing.  Sadly that is not how I'm wired. I procrastinate. Which truth be told is not a method so much as a lack of one, another activity entirely. And while I am procrastinating, I daydream. And lately that dreaming has been about opening a restaurant.