Girl Meets Kitchen, or Not

Necessarily a Love Story

“Happy and successful cooking doesn’t rely only on know-how;
it comes from the heart, makes great demands on the palate and needs enthusiasm and a deep love of food to bring it to life.”

Georges Blanc, from Ma Cuisine des Saisons

I was not the kind of kid who grew up at my mom’s knee, helping her chop carrots for Sunday night’s chicken soup. I never really helped with any meal preparation, preferring to turn my attention in the kitchen to baking. There was always some social event with friends or a youth group party where I needed to bring brownies. The one memorable time I tried to make instant potatoes? Instead of the specified one-quarter tablespoon of salt, I used a quarter cup salt. That incident happened over twenty-five years ago, and I have yet to stop hearing about it from my loving and encouraging family.

Suffice to say, I was a bit ill-prepared for the cooking adventures that lay ahead as I lived on my own for the first time. And to complicate matters? My first apartment was in Uji, Japan, approximately seven thousand miles from my mother’s loving embrace and her pot-roast recipe (as if I could afford beef in Japan).

The recipe cards were stacked against me. No cooking skills to speak of, living in a foreign land where most of the time I couldn’t identify what I was eating much less figure out how it was prepared, a kitchen the size of my coat closet back home, and an oven so small it made me long for the Easy-Bake one of my childhood.

I was terrified going to the supermarket without an escort and a translator. I didn’t speak the language (as a short-term missionary teaching conversational English, speaking Japanese was actually a disadvantage in my job), and as unfamiliar as I was with food shopping in the U.S., shopping in Uji was like watching a foreign movie without subtitles and then having to write a paper on the plot.

Oh, and eating out? So not an option. While my cooking skills were limited, my food budget was near nonexistent.

A few things were easy to recognize. The bread in Japan was amazing. It was buttery and flaky and perfect. And there was some really lovely cheese and ham. So, for the first three months of exploring this exotic new culture, I ate ham and cheese sandwiches every single night for dinner.

As I started to get to know some of my students and coworkers better, I had this urge to invite them over to hang out with me. But I had a sneaking suspicion they would want to be fed. I knew that my students would love some authentic American dishes. The question was, Who would I get to cook them?

Another short-term missionary, Diana, had a cookbook called More-With-Less. This wonderful little book produced by the Mennonite community had tons of recipes that used simple ingredients most cooks would have in their kitchen. While I didn’t have a lot of pantry staples in my four-story walk-up, I was now armed with a grocery list as well as an English-to-Japanese dictionary for my trips to the store.

I started to look for simple things I could make: salads, sandwiches, curries, and mini-pizzas out of English muffins and ketchup. (I promise, my culinary skills and taste have gotten better over the years.) As I grew braver in all things cuisine, I started to ask my mom to send some of my favorite recipes from back home.

In fact, when I threw a Christmas celebration with my friend Spenser in my micro-sized apartment, we managed to make a fondue-potless version of my mom’s Pizza Fondue. Shopping for the ingredients proved challenging, even for Spenser who spoke near-fluent Japanese. After several attempts to translate cornstarch into the native language (One would think corn + starch = cornstarch, right? Wrong. It’s pronounced korunstarcha.), we headed back to my kitchen and made one of the best meals I have ever eaten—lots of tomato sauce, some ground beef, loads of cheese, and just the right amount of korunstarcha.

Pizza Fondue
(Connie Richerson)

½ lb. ground beef

1 small onion, chopped

2 10½-oz. cans pizza sauce (I use marinara sauce)

1 T. cornstarch (or korunstarcha, if you prefer)

1½ tsp. oregano

¼ tsp. garlic powder

2 cups cheddar cheese, shredded

1 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded

1 loaf French bread

Brown the ground beef and onion; drain. Put meat, sauce, cornstarch, and spices in fondue pot. When cooked and bubbly, add cheese. Spear crusty French bread cubes, then dip and swirl in fondue. This is also delicious with breadsticks. Serves 4 to 6.

From that point on, I was hooked on collecting my favorite recipes. I bought my own copy of More-With-Less when I got back to the States, and when I got married a few months later, I received my very first copy of everyone’s favorite red-and-white-plaid Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, with every recipe an emerging home cook could want.

I think most of us home cooks have a similar story to tell. OK, you probably didn’t have your first significant cooking experience in Uji, Japan, but I bet the first few times you got dinner on the table all on your own, you might as well have been in a different country.

Maybe your mom had you peeling potatoes before you could walk. Maybe you have a rich heritage of recipes passed down from your grandmother. None of our cooking histories are going to look the same, but we do have one thing in common: We all need to get dinner on the table.

I am not a professional cook. Tom Colicchio will never be critiquing my braised kale and chocolate with bacon foam on Top Chef. But over the past twenty years I have put dinner on the table almost every single night. And while my family still likes a pizza from the neighborhood shop, our kids who have left home really look forward to coming back for a home-cooked meal.

That is all the reward I need.

Why This Book?

So, you discovered my deep dark secret—I’m not a professional chef. I don’t have my own show on Food Network, my own brand of spatulas, and I’m not going to be appearing on any morning show making a frittata for Kathie Lee Gifford.

Still, I’m required to feed our large family almost daily. So when I come across a cookbook, I have an unnatural need to own it. I’m always looking for new recipes to keep dinner interesting at our house. I have an entire bookshelf in my kitchen for my ever-growing collection.

But to be honest with you, most of the money I’ve spent on those cookbooks could have been better spent on a good set of knives or a heavy iron skillet.

I have found that most cookbooks are aimed at the fantasy life many of us aspire to—entertaining regularly, having unusual and exotic ingredients on hand, and hours and hours in the kitchen to create these masterpieces, from scratch.

And then there is my reality. Yes, sometimes I like to spend a Saturday afternoon cooking up a big feast for friends and family. But most days? I want to get a delicious, healthy meal on the table quickly.

My test when I’m purchasing new cookbooks? I flip to a half dozen or so recipes throughout the book and ask myself, Can I imagine cooking this recipe in the next couple of weeks? If most of the recipes fail the test, the book stays at the store.

I want the reality. I want dinner on the table every night without being seduced by pictures of stylist-arranged food that—let’s be honest—I’m never going to prepare.

While those books offer up a lot of grilled-chicken-in-a-peanut-sauce-in-the-sky dreams, I need some reality. It’s not just about the recipe; it’s about all the aspects of getting dinner on the table.

By the end of this book, my hope for you is that you will be able to:

save time, money, and energy when it comes to
preparing meals
have less stress when it comes to shopping
get your kitchen prepared for battle
learn some stress-free ways to get dinner on the table
get out of your cooking rut
This book is all about the process, the how of getting dinner on the table. It reflects the collective wisdom of hundreds of women who don’t have prep cooks or a crew of interns trying out new recipes. We are the women who spend a significant part of our days thinking about, shopping for, and preparing dinner. And all these wise, wonderful women are going to show you a better way to get dinner on the table no matter what your cooking background or skill level.

This is the book I wish I’d had when I first started cooking, as well as when I was raising my brood of pint-sized food critics.

Don’t worry, there will be plenty of recipes. We all love to find that one recipe that is going to become a family favorite! But this book has much more than that. My hope is that you will be able to use the recipes you already have, the ones in this book, and the new ones you find along the way to set a big, bountiful table for your family.

At Stake in 2012
Where do we go from here? And how do we get there?
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding.
—Proverbs 4:7, nkjv

Never has our nation faced a time of upheaval and tension such as this. Since Election Day 2008 we have endured a near implosion of our financial foundation with widespread collateral damage in the form of a continuing recession; a subdued, chugging, and burping economic recovery; unemployment that remains painfully close to the 10 percent threshold; real estate values that have yet to find their bottom let alone begin to mount any form of substantial rebound; bailouts; layoffs; massive deficits as far as the eye can see; a lecture from the media elite that our civic discourse isn’t civil enough, conveniently after their candidate was elected to the White House—recall how dissent was the highest form of patriotism, but apparently only until January 19, 2009—and the cherry on the bad-news sundae in the form of a tin-eared administration that responds to
the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by ramming a multi-trillion-dollar socialized medicine new
entitlement down the throats of the American people.

It is hard now to decide what the larger insult added to injury was: the repugnant charade committed by Nancy
Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democrat-majority Congress under the name “deem and pass,” or the blatant hypocrisy across the county from the summer of 2009 and early 2010 as the talking heads of the media slandered the Tea Party with vulgar remarks night after night on television.

In hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t be shocked by anything this administration has done since taking office. They stated with vivid clarity near the end of the campaign season their intent not to “let a serious crisis go to waste.” And indeed they wasted no time concocting their “Stimulus Bill,” a moniker so breathtakingly steeped in Orwellian double-speak you had to wonder if they themselves ever wonder, “Can we really get away with this?”
They certainly did, and it’s quite challenging to arrive at any conclusion other than the political Left of the United States viewed their stimulus plan as their chance to raid the public treasury with the same reckless abandon they utterly wrongly ascribed to their political foes on the right during the Bush years, and specifically during the War on Terror following the September 11 terror attacks. Make no mistake—the political Left in the United States shrieked for more than six years in all their Bush derangements syndrome glory against the fraud and opportunism they accused the Bush administration of in response to the 9/11 terror attacks—and then turned around and did the exact same thing in reaction to the financial crisis of late 2008 and the ensuing recession that defined the first few years of the Obama administration.

Within that time span there was also the Obama Apology Tour in which the president attempted to curry favor with every left-wing goon around the world by attempting to apologize for everything the Bush administration had done. One wonders how the free people in Iraq felt about that apology, while popular uprisings across the Middle East hear not the first whisper from Washington in support of their calls for democracy. They must all wonder how the priorities of the United States got so far out of whack so fast.

And now we look ahead at what’s before us . . .

• What sort of economic fallout will there be in the years after huge deficits resulting from the economic stimulus?
• How will the freedom movements in the Middle East shake out in the long term?
• In the near term, will the instability of the Middle East and the corresponding spiking of oil prices completely derail the global economic recovery?
• How many candidates will join the fray for the Republican nomination? Will we be choosing between Newt and Sarah? Will Jeb Bush jump in?
• What kind of all-out blitz will the country be subjected to for the reelection of Obama, considering the raid on history the Left pulled just to get Obama in office the first time?
• Will the recovery have legs and start blooming jobs by the time the summer of 2012 rolls around?
• Or will there be some kind of double-dip, the recovery dragged down by the massive deficits and municipal debt at the state level or the slow-to-recover commercial real estate market?
• Will there finally be an energy policy grounded in innovation?
• And how much more spreading around of other people’s wealth will we have to endure before our economy gets back on a solid footing of competitiveness and growth?

As believers, we know to take our cares and concerns with thanksgiving and petition our Lord in prayer. And as
we said in the run-up to 2008, the first thing Christians must do is pray. Pray that the Lord will raise up godly
candidates whose values are based on biblical principles and who will govern in a way that is in agreementwith God’s wisdom and honors the blessings God has given. And encourage others to pray as well.

Second, stay informed of where the candidates stand on the critical issues highlighted for you in this book.
Third, get involved. Speak up in support of candidates who hold biblically based positions on key issues.
Fourth, if you aren’t registered to vote, register now, while there’s still time to vote in the important elections
this fall.
Fifth, contribute financially to the campaigns of candidates you support.
Finally, cast your vote accordingly. May the new president we elect in November of 2012 be a godly, wise
servant of this wonderful nation who will lead us into a rich, wondrous future.