Dear Friends:
THE HISTORY OF COOKING
This section is about the tips, easy recipes and tricks of the trade to make some of your attempts at cooking more professional, appealing and fun. Cooking is as old as time. In the beginning I can see the first caveman discovering the joy of a good pulled pork sandwich and french fries while observing the NFL. Thats the Neanderthal Fighting League when man really got into this food thing. It was the Cro-magoons vs. the Neandermen, an outstanding game only if you were the winner. It was heart and sometimes head breaking for the losers. Food, water, and shelter were the prizes for survival and the Cro-Magons were better adapted to surviving the Ice Age than the Neanderthals. Brian Fagan's book on the subject is very revealing. The theory that they fought to extermination has never been proven.
"Cro" also probably discovered beer about the same time and that caused the even better "great revelation". Cold beer and hot food is a lot better! Fortunately remnants of the ice age kept the beer cold, cooking the pork-e-saurus and burnt ba-day-does presented new problems like burnt hands.
His next major advent was the discovery of controlled fire when a friendly Neanderthal Weber door to door salesman came by and showed him the benefits of charcoal and slow cooking. Looking back at his burnt cave, and still smarting from his burnt hand he thought this was a good plan.
Cooking was time consuming so he enlisted the help of the ladies of the cave which led to equality. He taught his wife to do the cooking since he almost burnt his arm off four times. She invented the stick to hold the meat. Wives invent sticks, men invent clubs.
THINGS DON'T CHANGE
When you seek recipes on the web there are ten thousand variants of the same thing. Here are recipes I culled stock ideas from and modified from the web closest to how I cook. I rarely use a cookbook, most chefs on TV never show you the stock recipes they cook from, adding a pinch here and a new flavor there. I rarely write things down. I am what they call taste motivated and you would not like some of the concoctions I have made since I thought they were terrible too. Simple lousy taste on occasion.
Many came from my Mom, memory and family, since I am older now, a lot older than some of these TV chefs and I chuckle a bit since most of these common recipes have been around, some dating back centuries, some slightly different based on country of origin. But when these celebrity TV chefs claim they invented the wheel, I remind myself of E'UMMGLICK, the first caveman to attempt faux gras on a stick who proudly announced, "It tasted great, last time it tasted more of hair and burnt nails", now I use a stick!". I have seen it before.
Feel free to alter, change, modify, correct, substitute, and let your taste buds lead the way.... These recipes are endless and passed down through the generations, once in a while a burnt hair smolders in my kitchen reminding me of the real chefs a long time ago who scratch cooked things and wrote them down...
After my Mom passed on I realized when I cleared out her belongings for charity, I never found a cookbook, no notes, it was all in her head.