This development appeared more difficult for Mom than for Dad, due perhaps to her background. She clipped drawers-full of recipes from food mags, attended culinary schools in Europe, cooked ever more delicious meals for us all. Later, when most of us had grown into our late ‘teens and twenties, she blossomed, like the roses she adored. She based her spaghetti sauce in Heinz tomato soup. In the beginning, it was frozen slabs of halibut thrown like horseshoes onto the baking sheet and topped with a mix of mayonnaise and ketchup. What I remember most about my mother, foodwise, is how she graduated as a cook. In all the vicissitudes of our family, in all the crazy things that we kids did to our parents, my father did not blink away from that division of his love for his children.Įnjoy other great recipes and tips from Bill St. I was the oldest, the biggest, the hungriest.Ī long time passed before I saw through to what my father did that dinnertime. How dare he? I deserved a bigger portion than the others. I stormed out of the dining room, enraged. Then he said: “I want you kids to know that, in my eyes, each of you is equal. And it worked, but it also boiled the waters of suspense.Ĭame time, my dad pulled out a Snickers bar-one Snickers bar-and divided it with a knife into nine equal pieces and passed those around, each nugget on its own little plate. Now that’s a carrot, pal, to get your children to behave at table and finish their plates. One evening at dinner when I was in my mid-teens (and Number Nine was in diapers), my father told us that he had “a big surprise” for dessert. Not our own rooms and their cozies of privacy. Not the family room and its come-hither TV. The dining room was clearly the most important room in our house. Our family would go through three loaves of bread, two gallons of milk, and a jar of peanut butter-a day. Growing up, I nicknamed my mother’s oven “Noah’s Ark.” Everything she cooked in there went in in pairs: two hams, two pies, two casseroles. John in the backyard of their Denver home, circa 1995. Pretty much all that I really need to know, I learned as a youngster eating in the company of my parents. You may have to select a menu option or click a button.A little over 30 years ago, the author and minister Robert Fulghum published his runaway bestseller “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” in which he listed life rules such as “Share everything,” “Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody,” and “Flush.”
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