My Sweet Mother's Cooking

City Grocery Balcony, July 4th Weekend 2009

Most of us love our mother's cooking.  Unfortunately being Southern doesn't guarantee that you have a mama who can cook.  Fortunately that is not my case. My mother inherited her cooking abilities from previous generations and then added her own flavor to create her array of signature dishes. My mother is very much like me in her love for restaurants but when she wants to cook, anyone who is lucky enough to be around will enjoy an amazing meal.

Choosing just a few of my favorites that my mother makes is quite hard to do but the following come to mind as the food she is known for. Most importantly, my mother is also known for never having a dull meal.  She will always say, "I need a little tang." Translation: There better be tomatoes around somewhere!

I loved ketchup as a child but that was the only tomato based food I would eat so my mother made accommodations for her picky eater. She always fixed me a different meal when she made chili and spaghetti.  We would have big family dinners and I remember my family so perplexed that I was eating Hormel Chili while they ate homemade chili.  Or I would have plain, buttered spaghetti and a hamburger patty to the side (with ketchup!) when my family ate spaghetti and meat sauce.  Eventually I grew out of that phase and now won't even touch Hormel chili! What was I thinking???

WHAT'S FOR DINNER? SPAGHETTI WITH MEAT SAUCE!
Mom says that she must have come here knowing how to cook spaghetti because she can't remember when  she learned how to make it.  She just remembers it being the main meal she knew how to cook.  She was telling me yesterday when she was about 18, her boyfriend at the time would joke to his friends, "If we ever get married, I will ask someone to come to dinner and say we are having spaghetti." He would continue to say he would always know to tell potential dinner guests they were having spaghetti because that is the only thing she knew how to cook.  Mom said he was weird so she broke up with him but thankfully kept making the spaghetti and many other things contrary to what he thought!

Meat Sauce for Spaghetti
1 lb ground beef (Note: we use ground turkey now)
1 medium onion - chopped
1 green bell pepper - chopped
2 cloves garlic - diced
1 teaspoon oregano
1 to 2 bay leaves
1 large can diced tomatoes
1 small can (6 oz) tomato paste
2 cans (8 oz) tomato sauce
1 to 2 cups water as needed
Salt to taste and a little red cayenne pepper

Brown ground meat - add onions, peppers, and garlic.  Saute until onions and peppers are done. Add spices, tomato sauce, paste, and water. Cover and simmer for at least 1/2 hour, possibly longer. Serve over spaghetti or angel hair pasta.

This recipe can be increased if cooking for a larger group like a large Southern family supper!

  
SOUTHERN GIRL COOKS IN DENVER
When my mother was 18 she moved to Denver for about a year and took a cookbook from Mississippi to Colorado with her.  This was the first time that my mother would be taking care of her own place and learning how to cook more than spaghetti.  She remembers that she came across a recipe in this book called Chili con Carne and has been using this recipe for the last forty-one years.  To me, it is the taste of home. Recently, I thought it was important to me that I learned these recipes. I want to be able to make them exactly how my mother cooks them because other dishes may be delicious but nothing tastes like home the way your own sweet mother does them.

Chili con Carne (No more Hormel for me!)
1 lb ground beef (Note: we use ground turkey now)
1 medium onion - chopped
1 medium bell pepper - chopped
1 to 2 cloves garlic - diced
2 to 3 Tbsp chili powder
1 large can diced tomatoes (Hunt's)
2 to 3 8 oz cans of tomato sauce (Hunt's)
2 cans dark red kidney beans (Bush's beans)
Salt and pepper to taste

Brown ground meat, add onion, peppers & garlic. Cook until onions and peppers are done. Add tomatoes, sauce, chili powder, and beans. Cover and simmer for at least 1/2 hour or longer.

Fixin some cornbread

SOUTHERNERS LOVE THEIR CORNBREAD

There isn't a meal that doesn't welcome a pan of hot cornbread, unless you are on one of those low carb diets which never last too long in the South.  However, my family is a very health conscious Southern bunch hence the turkey substitutions in the previous recipes. We rarely fry foods or eat sugar. We don't eat beef.  And we drink lots of wine - that is of course for heart health only!  I know wine consumption is a difficult practice to acquire but it is all in the name of health.Therefore, in the name of health, cornbread is a rarity in our house but a special treat when we do have it.

Drinking wine in the name of health!

I love my mother's cornbread.  It is so good that when eaten right out of the oven there is no need to even add butter to it. My Uncle Tommy use to always tell her she needed to open up a cornbread restaurant. I am still learning how to make it because I don't get that much practice. I made it for the first time this past Christmas and was very proud of myself.  It is probably going to be time for me to try another pan soon!

First time I made cornbread! Complete Southern set-up: cornbread, hot sauce, and wine (there was other food not pictured)!

Cornbread
2 cups self rising corn meal
1 egg
1/4 cup oil (usually canola oil)
1 cup buttermilk (possibly a little more)

Preheat oven to 425 to 450 degrees. Mix all ingredients well. Grease a heavy iron skillet with some oil and heat. Pour mixture into hot skillet - bake until golden brown on the top (usually about 25 minutes).