Cooking with Kate (Don't Come to Class)

Last night we had 21 people over for dinner. It wasn't really planned - people were asked at the last minute or they just dropped in. Not a problem. There was plenty to eat - I made Lasagna.
This all is basically boring, but you have to understand how far I've come.


When we got married 36 years ago I had a 5 item cooking repertoire.
It consisted of:

1. Pop-tarts (toasted or cold and I preferred the chocolate ones with the vanilla icing)

2. Lady Fingers (This was something my sisters and I invented. You take a piece of buttered toast and sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar and cut it into five strips. We had this for lunch every day one summer while my mom worked and I think I actually had an addiction to it for awhile.)

3. Oatmeal

4. Hamburger Helper (This tasty meal I had learned to make while baby-sitting for my neighbor's kids. Their mom actually served this garbage on a regular basis. I can personally guarantee that no box of any kind of helper every made it into my mom's grocery cart.)

5. Okay there was only really 4 things I could make. I thought I could make hard boiled eggs, however, that wasn't entirely true. One of the first times I attempted to make them, I put them in water to boil. I waited patiently a full 3 minutes before getting bored with the whole process. That's when I decided to go out and take a swim in our apartment pool while waiting for them to finish. A few hours later when I returned there was a spectacular black smoking mess on the stove. 30 years later when they tore down the building on Claremont Mesa Boulevard in San Diego, there was still a lingering odor in my old apartment. So I won't count the eggs as one of my accomplishments.


We did eat back in those days - James did all the cooking. We both worked and until we had kids it was a great arrangement. I became a stay at home mom and it started to annoy James to have to work all day and then come home and start dinner.


But that was then. Now I make huge meals every day and people actually take seconds and sometimes thirds.
But I have a plan! I don't want my daughters to end up like I was, so I'm teaching them to cook. I'm thinking this could be my way out - for awhile anyway.