When
I was a small child, I was always wanting to
help my mom mix things. When I was about 5 years old, I was standing on
a chair
stirring something on our wood stove for her. Lightening came down
the
stove pipe and knocked the spoon out of my hand. That was my first
experience with cooking.
Some of my fondest memories of my Grandma
Allison
are the times I spent helping her cook. She would wake me up at 4:00 in the morning to grind coffee for
breakfast. Grandma Allison would
mix and roll out the Biscuit
dough and I would cut it and we would bake them in
the oven of her wood-burning stove.
It was natural for girls to learn to cook in
the
"old days," as we had to fix all our food, especially on the farms
where
I grew up. In those days, all we had to cook on was a wood-burning
stove. My first experience cooking on a gas-burning stove was in
Home
Economics class at Wagoner High School in Oklahoma. I remember thinking how
convenient it was to just turn a knob and have instant fire to cook on.
I lived with Irene and Waldo Jones, friends
of our
family, at one time. Irene was an excellent cook. One of the
many
cooking skills I learned from Irene was how to make good pie
crust. The Applesauce
Cake recipe came from Irene. It is not only my oldest recipe,
but the first written recipe that I remember having. I don't
recall Mom
ever having a recipe written on paper when I was growing up.
After I got married, I experimented with many
different recipes getting some from a cookbook I received as a wedding
gift,
clipping them from newspapers or magazines. Milt especially liked
my Chocolate
Chip Cookies and my Apple
Pie. My children always had home
baked cookies in their lunches and thought store-bought cookies were a
treat,
and, so sometimes they would trade one of my home baked cookies for a
store-bought one.
I especially liked cooking on holidays making
special treats for my family. Treats that became a tradition were
iced Cutout
Cookies, Press
Cookies, and Divinity
for Christmas; Popcorn
Balls for
Halloween, a decorated heart-shaped Red
Devil's Food Cake with "To My
Valentine" written on it for Valentine's Day, and white cake decorated
with 7-Minute frosting sprinkled with dyed green coconut and jelly
beans for
Easter.
Cooking has
always been a very enjoyable part of
my life. |