Sufficient for the supper
I don’t have many food memories from when I was young. We ate wel enough, but there are no recipes that I can point to my children and say, there, that’s what I had when I was your age, or something equally frivolous.
We weren’t big consumers of salt fish or salt beef or other things Maritimish. We had a different view of the spice rack; salt, pepper, sugar (and molasses, for variety). There was no book of traditional recipes.
By the time I arrived on campus, food was something you ate when you were hungry (a certain logic in that). I am still gently mocked by friends for my admiration of fine cafeteria cuisine. I guess they don’t realize how the “hot line” has its own special flavour. How potatoes that have been mixed with an industrial blender don’t have the same consistency as those mashed in a home kitchen. How pasta should be hot and neutral.
Today I prepared a large lasagna. How large, you say? Well, it required a whole box of noodles. And two tubs of ricotta cheese. I didn’t even know what ricotta meant until I started cooking for the family with real cookbooks. Cafeteria lasagna requires noodle, sauce and a hot line pan. The idea of different sauces and adding pepperoni and all the different cheeses was foreign to me.
Or how about a starter salad, such as tabouli. New, new, new.
The end is the same, though. Once the lasagna pan is empty (which corresponds with breakfast time when there are teenaged boys around) it still needs to be scrubbed. They’ve shown me a neat pre-soak trick, though. Just call in the faithful family dog. She is industrious and determined when it comes to such tasks. The pan is clean before it gets to a tour of duty in the dishwasher.
