Back to the basics

My mind wandered as I made nachos recently — organic tortilla chips, shredded cheese, chopped jalapeno peppers and a jar of salsa. Not just any brand of salsa, but my daughter’s homemade with tomatoes and other ingredients that she grew.

As I assembled the nachos, I thought back to a conversation we had when she was a young teen when I asked her to come to the kitchen and help me fix dinner.

During those years, she was good at finding activities that kept her elsewhere when I was in the kitchen. That particular summer afternoon, though, I decided I needed some help and she needed to learn some basics. It was clear from her body language, comments, and attitude that she would rather be outside digging ditches or inside cleaning toilets.

Exasperated, I finally said, “Erin, you may get married some day after you’ve grown up. Your future husband might appreciate you knowing how to cook.”

“I’ll marry someone who can cook,” she replied.

And darned if she didn’t, but that isn’t my point.

When I was her age, my mother worked more than full time. After getting home around 5:30 p.m. each evening, she would drop her armload of books, take off her coat, and call my younger sister or myself to the kitchen. With one helper, she could frequently have the meal on the table in half an hour. Not fancy food, but we never left the table hungry. Also, a cake or brownie mix would often be thrown together to make use of a hot oven. Sunday dinner required two helpers.

Dad was a meat-and-potatoes type of guy, so he was perfectly happy with moose or caribou roast, boiled potatoes, and a canned vegetable the majority of the time. Fried potatoes with onions or creamed potatoes were extra special. Rice and beans were not a staple of our home. No Italian, Chinese, or Mexican food graced our table.

As a teacher, Mom had most of the summers off. It was during those months that she taught us how to make banana bread, piecrust and others things that took more time. One late summer day, our lesson was how to make jam and jelly using paraffin to seal the jars. With three daughters, she only had to teach once and then one of us could carry on from there. We also were expected to help with freezing the homegrown carrots for winter use and other food-related chores.

So, although I knew the basics when Gary and I married in 1973, one wedding gift cookbook intrigued me enough to start experimenting with a whole new world of tastes and textures. My efforts weren’t all successful, but Gary didn’t complain.

I knew nothing about baking with yeast or how to preserve foods by canning, but learned those techniques within a couple of years. Gary worked on a construction crew and the wife of one of his coworkers showed me how to make bread, which opened up the whole world of yeast dough creations.

The fall of 1974 while living near Fairbanks, we grew a successful garden and were swamped with vegetables. We didn’t have electricity so I couldn’t freeze our extra produce and decided instead to can it. We had a pressure cooker and Gary knew how to use it, so that wasn’t a problem. But, I’d never heard of the water bath canning required for cucumber pickles and pickled beets. After reading and rereading the directions from the Cooperative Extension bulletins and from my “Complete Guide to Home Canning, Preserving and Freezing” book, I still didn’t understand the concept.

The instructions read: place the jars in the canner. With absolutely no idea what a canner looked like, I tried placing the quart jars in my tallest pot, but it was too short to cover the jars with the required two inches of water. At the time we used two-gallon galvanized water pails in the kitchen because without electricity we also had no running water.

I finally decided to use a water pail for my canner and probably used tin foil for a lid. It seemed like it worked OK, but I didn’t want to take any chances and soon asked advice from an older lady who had one of the largest gardens in the community. In no time I made a trip to the hardware store in Fairbanks and bought an official water bath canner.

In the years since she lived at home, Erin’s mastered many skills in the kitchen. Last January I flew to Colorado and spent two weeks with her family in their home. While there, she seemed content to be in the kitchen while I spent most of that time playing and interacting with my grandkids. I was impressed with the variety of interesting food she served during my visit. She’s thrifty and health-conscious and makes her meals from scratch, but they are definitely not meat-and-potatoes type of meals. Her delicious falafel balls and parmesan eggplant are two items I’ve never even prepared.

From her own bountiful garden, she had canned cases of cut tomatoes, tomato, pizza, bruschetta, and enchilada sauces, more than one kind of pickles, hot dill beans, grape jelly and three heat levels of salsa. She also likes to keep a variety of home canned beans on hand for convenience when she doesn’t have time to soak the dried.

I’d packed jars of my canned salmon in my baggage for the trip to Colorado and happily exchanged them for a variety of her specialties — something I never dreamed possible when she was a young teen. Although she didn’t receive many cooking lessons from me, I needn’t have worried about her future in the kitchen.

Maraley McMichael is a longtime Mat-Su Valley writer and resident.