Growing up with my mother, food had
to be a big part of my life. Had I
been a picky eater, I very may well have been placed for adoption. I would sit in the kitchen while she
made dinner. While talking about
the events of the day, I would snack on the ingredients and stick my finger in
the sauces, trying to taste new flavors all of the time. My mother is a chef and has owned two
restaurants with my father for the past thirty years. While she comes up with new recipes and makes sure the cooks
are preparing food correctly, my father runs the business side of the
operation. Together, they work
perfectly and the restaurants have been successful through good economic times
and bad. Being able to go into
their restaurants and see what they created was influential on me as I
child. My parents taught me many
lessons but the most important among them was to take risks.
In addition to my mother being a
great cook, my grandmother cooked more traditionally but was excellent nonetheless. Going over to her house on one of
Minnesota’s many lakes was a weekly occurrence. Their house that looked like a cabin was on White Bear Lake. In the summertime I would spend weeks
at a time there. My grandfather
and I would sit on the dock, fishing for sunfish. I would swim with my cousins and have the neighbor kids over
on the pontoon boat. It was here
that I made fond memories. After
catching a string of fish with my grandfather we would fillet them ourselves
and bring the fish steaks up to my grandmother. She would bread the fish and fry them in butter. I can still taste the flavor of lemon
squeezed on the panko-breaded sunnies.
After my grandfather past away, my
uncle Jack became a big part of my life.
The fishing adventures, building forts, high dives off the dock and
wooden aircraft carriers became my summers as a child. My uncle was a dentist, giving him the
technique to build things and this inherent creativity that only some are
blessed with. He applied these
talents to many activities such as building a wooden airplane I could ride in
that my father later flipped himself over trying to push me down the driveway
in it. In addition, however, my
uncle was a good cook himself.
What I will always remember making with him are plum dumplings. Him and his wife are from Seattle. At their house out on Lake Washington
they have plum trees and when they are in season they fly out to Minnesota with
a box of them. We would spend an
afternoon wrapping the plums in a piecrust like material and covering them in
sugar. After a while in the oven,
these piping hot dumplings could be eaten.
My family is obsessed with
food. My immediate family more so
then the rest but when we’re all together, the meals that come out of it are
amazing. Both my brothers are in
the restaurant industry, following after my parents. I’m not sure what I’ll do after college yet but I suspect at
some point that it will have something to do with food. I can’t count the amount of cooking
classes my mother sent me to on weekends in middle school but the memories will
always be there. I went to Paris
for one month in the summer after 10th grade and took a course on
cooking. What I took away from
that experience was a love for food of all cultures. We spent days and nights going to different restaurants and
meeting the chefs. We created
meals with them and learned new techniques. The opportunities I’ve had for experiencing food and cooking
are amazing. I love cooking myself
but I know that whether or not I pursue a profession in cooking, its all been worth
it.
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