The Smoke Alarm is My Dinner Bell

It's no secret that I'm a bad cook. In fact the smoke alarm in our house has become our dinner bell. One day smoke poured out of the oven, the alarm went off, and instead of anyone screaming or cowering in fear, my children's attitude was nonchalance. My son leaned over from where he was sitting on the couch and yelled up the stairs to the other children that, "Dinner's ready!"

But does the apple ever fall far from the tree? While there are wonderful cooks in my family, it seems that bad cooking is a recessive gene that pops up through the generations. I don't have much knowledge about many of my ancestor's cooking skills, but I do know about a few grandmothers.

The farthest back that I can go up the ancestral tree is my paternal great grandmother. According to my grandfather, his mother didn't like her gig as a stay at home mom. Instead of doing housework or perfecting recipes, she pined for a college education. With all of that free time she had avoiding the kitchen, she taught herself painting and literature because she was constantly learning. Her zeal for all things cultured even lead to her acquiring 2 pianos despite it being the Great Depression. Each of her children were required to practice piano 5 hours a day during the summer and 3 hours a day during the school year. And probably the most shocking of all was when she told my grandfather to pursue concert piano because, "there's no money in engineering."

After majoring in concert piano, my grandfather did study engineering, and from what he told me, one of the perks of college life was the food. While everyone else complained about how bad the food tasted or how they missed their mother's cooking, he happily overate. He told me that since his mother's cooking was so bad, he was the only one at his college who actually liked the food and gained weight.

Like my father's family, my mother's family line also produced a memorable chef.  In the case of my Panamanian grandmother, this lack of cooking expertise broke a famous stereotype. You see, she was of Italian descent. And a grandmother. An Italian grandmother. Usually, those two words together conjure images of a warm-hearted woman who loves to push delicious food on anyone who enters her home. Warm hearted she was not. Upon seeing me shove spaghetti into my mouth and using my teeth to cut the noodles (a method I still employ today), she challenged me. "What kind of an Italian are you?" At that moment, actors on the family room TV were correctly twirling spaghetti with a spoon before raising a perfect little ball of noodles up to their mouths. "Look! Even those American actors can learn the right way to eat spaghetti."

Even if she wasn't warm-hearted, she at least did like to push food on us. However, we didn't like the food. When she visited us after a trip to Russia, she made borche. We kids still talk about that disgusting soup 30 years later. Another memorable food fail was when my friend spent the night and excitedly came to the table when she heard my grandmother grilled sandwiches for us. Maybe it was the frozen vegetables that my grandmother used to make it healthy, but these sandwiches were actually soggy instead of crispy. That's right. Soggy grilled sandwiches. I can remember being so embarrassed about my grandmother's cooking because I could hear my friend gag ever so slightly as she tried to get the food down. What always boggled my mind is that my grandmother had no idea that her cooking tasted gross. When she pushed food on us, she'd say in her thick Spanish accent, "Eat it! But it's gooood for you!" It wasn't long before my body cringed at those words, unlike Pavlov's happily salivating dog.

Staying close to the tree, I haven't fared much better in the kitchen. I loose count when I'm measuring ingredients, confuse 2 TBS of salt when I should only use 2 TSP, or my classic move is to overcook food because I forget that I'm cooking. Sometimes I tell myself that I can make a recipe even if the key ingredients are missing, or I'll just forget to put in the key ingredients.

Following in my Panamanian grandmother's footsteps, I probably embarrass my children when other kids spend the night. I have one nephew who doesn't even eat here anymore. He will politely tell me that, "I'm not hungry, Aunt Lizzy. We ate an early dinner."

And this food legacy continues. So far, I have one daughter who loves to cook like the wonderful cooks in the family and one who is falling in my footsteps. The one who loves to cook is so serious about food that she even plans to grow non-GMO food for the restaurant that she will one day own and where she will be the head chef. 

However, my other daughter seems to manifest the dreaded recessive bad cooking gene. Like her dear mom, she's not very precise when it comes to following recipes and has gained such a reputation for baking hard cookies that even her classmates will cover for her and bring in food on days she's assigned the task. They just don't want to be stuck with those hockey pucks that she tries to pass for cookies. 

It's lucky my house didn't burn down the day she tried to make those cookies for class. It's also the day my daughter learned what a convection oven is and how little time cookies need to bake. The smoke in the house from that failed attempt could have been used for "Stop, drop, and roll" videos. We now know that there really is clear air below the thick smoke. But who am I to judge? I pity her knowing that she has to live with this crippling disability for the rest of her life.

But so what? I fail at cooking and my food can be repulsive. I've come to terms with it and I'm no longer apologetic. If my food was perfect, wouldn't I be doing my kids a disservice? They would be so picky! Now they will be able to go anywhere in the world and eat whatever is put before them just like my grandfather did at college. And when they are deep in the jungles of a foreign land and take their first bite into that bug larvae and the guts squirt all around their mouth, I know my kids' eyes will well up with tears, and with conviction they'll say, "This tastes so much better than my mom's cooking."