Thoughts on food.

Thoughts on food.....
Talking food is making friends. Just yesterday while having a snack in Beverly Hills the waiter and I , he was from New Orleans bonded over our grandmothers recipes for pie. This happens whenever folks hear that I teach home cooking. Suddenly, we are mates with a common passion.Wonderful people have come to me via food.

My working class Pittsburgh family never laughed or argued anywhere as much as at the dinner table. College friends gathered in my first horrible apartment to eat piles of spaghetti. In later years my co workers in the Odyssey theatre would gather for pot luck thanks giving dinners. In fact the most I have ever laughed was when with my friends and I attempted to make a Snackin Cake stoned out of our minds. All these years later and just last night at we toasted with our friends their son and his lady who had just been engaged over a meal in the moonlight.

However it was five woman and one man who made me the cook I am today for bad or worse.

Mrs. Turi an Italian woman from my Pittsburgh childhood who taught me that the world

of good food extended beyond the local supermarket.

Rusty Flinton, who suggested that I not confuse not knowing how to cook with being a liberated woman.

Sadelle Bernstien who encouraged me to go " french " with Julia Child.

My Grandmothers, Shore and Kent who cooked more meals in their lives than I ever will. I respect them more than any star chef. Point of fact is that no one makes pies as good as they.

Everyday cookIng is hard work and requires more creativity than putting together one menu every few months not too mention you have no sous chef or dishwasher.

Oh and the guy that would be my husband who had to eat all my successes and my flops and still does with grace and Mylanta !