Where it all began

So I already mentioned my mom’s cooking and how it was the basis of my future as a kitchen fairy, but I figure I’d give more details as to how exactly my career developed.

I think my mom is an amazing cook – I really like a lot of the thing she does (and dislike a lot of others) – and I had an interest in cooking from when I was a little kid. I’d snoop around and have her let me taste the stuffing to the chicken for the Sunday dinners, or just look at what she was doing and eventually helping out (especially when it came to breading the schnitzel or the potatoes for lunch, or peeling vegetables for the soup.)

Then, when I was about five, I got a children’s cook book, which was published under the name of a Hungarian cartoon figure, Pompom. Pompom is this amazing little dude who cannot be characterised as any species, but he’s brown and fluffy and can serve as a hat, or a wig, or a scarf, or a muff – pretty much anything. He was a good friend of Picúr, a little girl and he’d spend a lot of his time sitting outside her school building on a tree, waiting for her. Now… Pompom had a cook book, where him and his friends would present recipes under their names, which was doable by children for the most part. I’ll never forget that I chose a liver recipe to surprise my mom with one day, dug through the freezer to find liver, and then finding out that I wasn’t going to be able to cut it up in slices. My dad was at home, and so, I asked him to help. My father, a real manly man, despises anything to do with cooking, and especially working with meat (let alone organs like liver.) He said no, and then I threw this huge whine fest about how I wanted to surprise mom but I was only 5 years old and couldn’t do it and now we won’t have lunch because he’s not helping, WTF, etc. to the point where my otherwise ridiculously patient father lost his calm, sprinted into the kitchen, chopped up the liver while gagging, and then said “well I hope you’re happy now!!!” I was. Of course I don’t remember how the dish tasted, but I know that I actually didn’t mess it up (i.e. didn’t put salt on the liver so it didn’t turn all tough, etc.) And that was my first “self-made” dish.

Then I made my own spaghetti Bolognese, or “cat goulash” as it is referred to at home, when I was nine years old (or so I thought at the time) – obviously my mom was in charge, but she made it look like I was doing everything. She never officially taught me anything, I pretty much picked everything up from her and my grandma (on my father’s side.)

I used to spend all my summers with my dad’s parents when I was a child, so my grandmother’s influence to my cooking is undoubtable. I would like to think that I learnt many things from her, however, our arguments about cooking mechanics are much more memorable. My grandmother and my mother had very different cooking styles, and as a child, I didn’t notice much of this. But as I got somewhat bigger (10-11) – I started noticing that my grandmother is doing some things differently, and I spoke up. This obviously unleashed my grandmother’s fury… :)

Example – my mother cooks green bean stew with garlic and sour cream. I think this is amazing, and I highly doubt I could eat it any other way. This is very untraditional, and my grandmother actually used to make it with parsley and then ate it with sugar(!!). When I told her that I wanted garlic and sour cream with my green beans, she went berserk, and told me that it was completely unorthodox, and my mother’s blasphemous cooking ideas shall never enter her kitchen. So I had to do without, until eventually I took over the cooking responsibilities from my grandma when she got old (and started putting leftover rice from the previous day into next day’s soup because she didn’t think it would hurt, etc.)

But all in all, my grandma was amazing. She’d actually make her own noodles (including vermicelli) and cut everything up herself – no machines, nothing. I wish I had learnt properly how to do this from her before she died, but I really didn’t have the patience when she tried, and she stopped doing it the last few years of her life. She also made the most amazing potato gnocchi I’ve ever had and I believe my sister still has that recipe, and it’s definitely on my list of things to learn.

So this is pretty much where it all started and then evolved into something possibly better as I grew older, but more about that later.