Recipes

Pecking order: Mothers, fathers,t hen baby - if only it were so!

Sunday, April 5, 2020

Food is an important — indeed, an absolutely essential — part of all our lives, but there is no doubt that some of us treat it as more essential than others.

Neither Raven nor I use the term foodie to describe ourselves, but we certainly know what we like; and what we like we can usually make better (not to mention cheaper, providing we don’t include our own labour costs, anyway) at home.

I’ve read that North Americans (a bit more south of the border, a bit less north of it) eat out an average of something like once or twice per day. Even before the current outbreak of Covid-19, and before we became parents, Raven and I probably ate out no more than once or twice a week, and we almost never ordered in.

In fact, I learned to cook pretty young. The first thing I can remember making was a batch of chocolate chip cookies out of an old Fannie Farmer cookbook. If memory serves, I was perhaps nine years old. By the time I was 10 and change, my parents had split up and I lived most of the time with my mother, who was working full time. Needless to say, I soon learned to make breakfasts and other things and, by the time I moved out on my own, I was a competent hand around the kitchen, if not an exceptional one.

Over time I got better and my reportoire expanded, but it wasn’t until I met Raven that I consciously started to work at improving my culinary skills.

When Raven and I met, I was a better cook than she was; I even dared to make Chinese food for her (or should I say “Chinese food”?), and she was kind enough to pretend that it was good. (Looking back, I’ll say that some of what I made was pretty decent Canadian-style Chinese food, but it was far from the authentic Chinese cooking that Raven prefers.

Raven quickly took up cooking herself and, as in most things she attempts, she almost as quickly surpassed me in quality and variety.

Nowadays, I tend to stick to the tried and true, such as my tomato sauces or chillies, though I have also started branching out into a variety of curries, and Asian cuisines like Thai and Malaysian.

In any case, between the two of us, we eat healthy and we eat delicious!

In this section, you’ll find a growing list of recipes that we (or at least, that I) think are not only worth eating, but worth sharing. And I promise that they won’t be nearly as prolix as this introductory page; one thing that drives me a little up the wall is the tendency of food bloggers to blather endlessly on about what they were doing and what they were wearing when they discovered and/or invented recipe x.

I dunno about you, but when I’m hungry I want my teacher to get to the point, thank you very much! Which is what you’ll find here, this introduction excepted.

So, without further ado, bon apétit!

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