Trying to get a recipe out of my mother is like pulling teeth. Mom doesn’t follow recipes. After 50 years of cooking for her family she doesn’t need to. She cooks instinctively, pulling ingredients from what we have on hand, making substitutions or additions as she sees fit. Taste testing here and there for a little more of this or that. To get a recipe out of her I have to watch her make something, take copious notes, and ask a lot of questions. For each seemingly innocuous question, there can be a dissertation’s worth of answers. “Well, Adele Davis did it this one way, Diane Kennedy did it this other way, and I do it this way because (fill in the blank… my pot is too big, I’m using an electric range, we don’t have any fresh cilantro.. etc. etc.)” My mother is never one to give someone the time when a thorough explanation of how the watch works and how they made clocks in China 2000 years ago will do. (Mom is a treasure trove of knowledge and I will never catch up to her, even if I cook every day for the next 40 years.)

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