Happy Mother's Day. If your mother is still with you, I hope you are cooking for her today to make up for all the meals she made for you; here's some help, a special Mother's Day edition of Carnival of the Recipes (one of my favorite Web places). If not, I hope she left behind recipes of some of the things she made for you.
Those who read this site regulary know I lost my mother recently. One of my treasures is a small cook's notebook in which she wrote down the recipes for some of our favorite things she made for us. The one I'm sharing is for yeast rolls, which comes with one of our family's favorite stories. My mother was praised far and wide for her yeast rolls. But they were really my father's yeast rolls. He was a cook in the Army during World War II, specializing in baking (although he had been trained as a medic, which, he always said, made perfect sense if you knew anything about the military). Early in their marriage, my mother looked through one of the cookbooks my father brought home. She found the recipe for yeast rolls and did a little math, figuring out how to make it serve a small family instead of a large Army post. Maybe it's just a family legend; but if it's not true, it should be. Anyway, here is the recipe:
YEAST DINNER ROLLS
1. In a small pot, heat one stick of butter, one cup of milk, a half-cup of sugar and a teaspoon of salt until the butter melts.
2. In a mixing bowl, combine a cup of warm water, a half-cup of sugar and two packages of yeast.
3. Combine the two and add six cups of flour gradually, until a stiff dough is formed.
4. Turn out on a floured board and knead.
5. Let rise in a buttered bowl until doubled.
6. Knead again and shape into rolls. Let rise again until doubled.
7. Bake at 350 until browned.
I realize that this is the type of recipe that requires you to fill in some blanks and practice a little. But trust me, it's worth it. When you bring up a freshly baked roll to your nose, the yeast smell should practically knock you off your feet.
My contribution to the family legend is that I had always wanted to learn some of the mountain crafts my father knew, like how to cane-bottom a chair or carve things out of coal. But before I was smart enough to ask him, he was too sick to teach me. So I took a baking class at Ivy Tech. Once I got into the kitchen, I discovered I liked it there. My cooking experience has been one of the joys of my life, not only something that is a tribute to my mother and father but an endeavor that has given pleasure to me and my friends.
I discovered a breakfast casserole dish -- kind of a quiche -- at a bed & breakafast. I started cooking it and playing around with the recipe, making it for a group of friends at work I'm in who do birthday carry-ins. Turns out there was something in the recipe that at least one person in the group didn't like -- one couldn't stand mushrooms, another hated onions, nobody especially wanted green pepper. Eventually, I pared that recipe down to the hash brown/bacon/cheddar&swiss cheese/egg and half&half concoction that everyone keeps asking for (with Old Bay seasoning the secret spice, in case you want to know). As my mother adapted my father's recipe for her family, I adapted mine for my friends' tastes.
My advice, for what it's worth on this Mother's Day (and Father's Day next month) is that you are missing out on more than you will ever know if you merely eat to live instead of living to eat. Take your fill of the food you inherited from your ancestors, then pass it on, adapting the recipes as you go, to the next generation. Life is a wonderful feast, and we are all at the common table.
