Hmm.

I used to think I knew how to cook.  When I was 6, my mom jumped me up onto a 3-legged stool that used to sit by our old electric stove and said, "Well, you're not much to look at, so we'd better teach you how to cook or you're never going to get married."

To the day she died, she denied ever having said that and I was a really cute little girl.  See?  Maybe it's the haircut.  (I was grown and married before I ever once saw the inside of a beauty salon)

Why my 6-year-old little brain would invent such a scene (I was not particularly self-persecuting) I cannot imagine and it was, overall, fairly out of character for my mother in retrospect.  Regardless, I did end up on the stool and my mother taught me took cook Southern Food.  (Always capitalized)  As Mom went into and out of the hospital, I became the family cook and then transferred that to my own family after I married. 

My first husband was an Air Force fella and we traveled all over the world and as we did, I learned how to cook foods from different cultures, so I managed to acquire a fairly well rounded pile of recipes.

Eric will still tell me that he fell in love with my fried chicken, biscuits and mashed potatoes first, then with me.  Pfft, maybe Mom was right! 

When I got HERE, however, a good bit of that changed.

I thought I made the best biscuits since KFC, but then I tried these:

These little packets are in the flour, sugar, etc aisle of Sav Mart (The NotAlbertson's on Missouri Flat Road).  You add water and mix it up and roll it out and bake it and I mean to tell you, these are absolutely the best biscuits you will EVER put in your mouth.  Anything I make from scratch, and my biscuits are DAMNED good, is immediately put to shame.  It makes about 6 biscuits, which I can pretty much eat between the time I get them out of the oven and then time I set the pan down on the trivet.  Don't defile them with anything other than real butter or you'll go to hell on the hell express in nothing flat.

I have to make 2-3 packages at once.   Fortunately, they are often in the 10 for $10 sales.  Don't bother with the cheese or garlic ones.  The buttermilk is what you want.

Then I thought I could make chocolate chip cookies, but I was wrong there too.  I got Robin Kelly's recipe and now I have my husband under my complete and total control.  You women out there can keep on manipulating with sex if you want to, but I'm telling you, those chocolate chip cookies are a much better bargaining tool.  (Use the recipe on the back of the Nestles semi-sweet chocolate chip package, but use Nucoa margarine and back down the oven temp by about 25 degrees.  Take them out of the oven a couple of minutes before they are actually done and let them finish cooking from the residual heat of the cookie sheet alone.  Eric is one of the few humans on earth who does not like chocolate chip cookie dough and so he's very careful about his cookies being "done" and he does love them this way.)

Then I thought I could cook a turkey.  This year marked the 30th year of me cooking Thanksgiving dinner every single year.  I always get good praise for my turkey.  But then, Jackie Smelser assured me that once I cooked a turkey her way,  I'd never cook it another way again.  She was right.  I put a 20 pound turkey, covered, in a 250 degree oven around 10pm, let it cook all night, then pull it out around 9am the following day.  YUM! and so EASY!

   =    ???

It was in the context of learning to cook a Jackie Smelser turkey, first discussed at the GFORCE Thanksgiving Dinner (if y'all missed this, and a bunch of you did, you should still be busy punishing yourself because it was just a big ol' ton of fun), along with the apparent fact that the turkey's butt is called "The Pope's Nose."  I just stared.  I mean, what kind of East Coast, anti-Catholic, colloquial crap is this?  The POPE's nose?  The turkey tail is The Pope's Nose?  Several in our little group nodded knowingly as I inquired to the validity of this with my eyes bugging out a bit.  We always called it The Turkey's Butt.  Fascinating.  (I still think some of them got together in advance of the event and tittered amongst themselves saying, "Let's make Katrina thing this is some kind of regional bullshit where we call the turkey butt "The Pope's Nose," hee hee hee hee.")

Lessee...

I thought I could make cornbread that was out of this world until I started making this:

Holiday has this, as does Sav Mart.  It's just the very best cornbread ever.

I used to think I could make homemade white bread until I found this:

Also available at both Holiday and Sav Mart.  Soooo easy and soooo good.  Again, befoul not this fine manna from Heaven with margarine!  It's really butter only, baby!  (Less than $3 a pound at Walmart)

I thought I could make rice until I found this:

Open it, microwave it, it's done.  Delena eats these things nonstop.  They are available at both Sav Mart and Safeway and run about $2.50 a pack.

I thought I made really excellent mashed potatoes until Robin (again) Kelly said, "Oh no, don't use russets. Use THESE..." and she whips out white potatoes like they are the holy grail of carbohydrates and damned if they weren't.  Eating russets is now like I'm slumming it in a potato field.

I tell you, it just goes to show that when you think you're the best you can be, there's always room for improvement.

I am, however,  a better cook than my mom was.

So there.

Be Particular,