Cooking – 7amkickoff

I’ve said this already but I’ll say it again: I have a cold. It’s the tail end of the cold but I’m still stuffy and gross. Because of the cold I’ve had a lot of time to sit around and think about things, mostly, what do I want to eat and what kind of food will make my cold go away. I guess when I’m on my down time I mostly think about food.

I spent a good part of Tuesday trying to remember what my mom would make us when we were sick and remembered just two things; an elaborate consomme and canned tomato soup. If I’m fair to my memories we only got the consomme once, the rest of the time it was tomato soup.

Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches made with American cheese and white bread, Pepperidge Farm white bread if we could get it. The tomato soup comes out of the can like a jelly, mom would reconstitute it with milk (that’s cream of tomato soup according to the helpful directions) and toast up the grilled cheese sandwiches.

Tomato soup, books, and bed rest. When I was a kid, this worked every time. That stuff didn’t work for this cold, at all. What this cold needed was something spicy. But the problem is that my family didn’t do spicy.

So, I asked Twitter what I should eat to take care of a cold and they mostly came back with “whiskey”, which isn’t at all helpful since I don’t drink anymore. Some people said “Jewish Penicillin” and there were the folks that said “chicken soup” but not a single person recommended kimchi stew which is what I had my eye on because I had some kimchi in the fridge that I hadn’t touched in a month. I looked at the ingredients, which were kimchi, gochugaru, meat, soy sauce and more red pepper flakes and thought “this should be spicy!”

But it felt weird thinking about making Korean soup. I’m not Korean for starters. I have no tradition of making food like this. And yet, I make curries (Thai and Indian), chile colorado, Kimchi soup, and hundreds of dishes from around the world. I simultaneously felt like I have no traditions and that I was taking from others that which I didn’t earn. I still wanted some Kimchi soup though.

We had one traditional dish that my mom would make which was “spicy”: Shrimp Dino. I’ve done some internet sleuthing for this old recipe and best I can tell it’s from one of those cards that moms would pick up at the grocery store with “recipe ideas” on them. Like dinosaur bones, those cards were put on earth by the Devil to confuse us about God. Let me just explain what went into the recipe:

rice
bechamel sauce
curry powder (the stuff from the 70’s not the real curry powder people get these days)
shrimp
swiss cheese

Put those ingredients into a casserole dish and bake it until the shrimp are no longer edible or until the swiss cheese is melted and brown. I ask you seriously, if there was a God, and he is all good, then why did he allow Shrimp Dino? Why did we eat this food? I don’t know. But I know that we made it at least once a month. Until the day that I had a shrimp accident.

I was peeling shrimp for the Shrimp Dino when a piece of shell flew in my eye. My eye swelled shut. We went to the emergency room. The doctor took the shrimp shell out of my eye and told me “you’re probably going to be allergic to shrimp from now on.” We never had Shrimp Dino after that.

In my teen years I experimented with shrimp* and it turns out that I’m not allergic to them. I have no idea why that doctor decided to tell us that I could never have shrimp again.

All of this got me thinking, what traditions do I have? And which ones have I carried forward and taught my daughter already? Here are the food traditions I have carried on:

“taco” night (there was no spice in this, unless you count cheese, tomatoes, and canned black olives)
mac and cheese
homemade bread
Tomato soup and Grouchie Sandwiches
Pot roast (done with beer – which is the Belgian way – or with wine, or even just with stock)
Scones
Roast beef (and Yorkshire pudding)
Thanksgiving: turkey (always overcooked but served with gallons of gravy), cranberries from a can, stuffing, and mashed potatoes
Christmas cookies

Those are all of the food traditions I could think of in the last two days. I bet I have more and I’m not remembering them. I’ll probably start making something for dinner and remember helping my mom make it when I was a kid. Maybe that’s the real tradition. Just me and mom in the kitchen cooking together. Cooking anything. Even shrimp with cheese.

Anyway, I made the Kimchi stew and plenty of rice. And I can report that it is not only delicious but also the perfect way to clear out your sinuses for a few hours when you have a cold.

*Not a metaphor.