33 and a Third

I started to think about my early cooking experiences after reading Debbies web log about her forays into cooking, and her comment: “… I’m not one of those natural cooks who can whip something up out of her imagination, with an intuitive knowledge of what ingredients go well together, just the right amount of spice to add.”

I’m not one of those cooks either. (Although I expect Reid would disagree. But that’s just because he so rarely cooks.) I thought about how much time I devoted to reading cook books when I was quite young, and how I enjoyed experimenting. Especially with desserts.

And I remembered one of my first recipes. One that I made up myself — my first, and last, original recipe. I must have been in my early teens, and my friend Carmela, was over for a visit. I told her I thought of a new dessert I’d like to make and I asked for her help. We took a couple of bananas and mashed them, and then added chopped up colourful fruit (like grapes, apples, etc.). Stirred it all up. Yum. Then my mother came into the kitchen and we offered her a taste. My mother took one look at the quivering brown, lumpy mass, put her hand to her mouth, turned an interesting shade of green, and ran from the room. I took a more critical look at our dessert. Ick.

I can’t stop giggling about it as I write this. My poor mother. Brought to mind my experience with snot muffins. Unfortunately, I can’t claim them for my own. I lived with my brother and sister-in-law while I was in university. My sister-in-law is quite a good cook, and she often made muffins or other yummy tidbits. I came home from university one evening to the lovely smell of home baked muffins. They offered me one, and I took a big bite. I found there were some sort of strange, gelatinous lumps within the muffins. What a weird, texture, I thought. I looked at what I had bitten into, at the greenish blobs, and exclaimed “Ew! What are these?!?! Snot muffins???!!” My poor sister-in-law was outraged: “They’re rhubarb!”. Ew. I couldn’t eat them, and it put me off rhubarb for years. The snot muffins are a running joke between us now. Along with the six-layer shit she served for dinner one night. But that’s a whole other story.