Experimenting?

It's become a bit of a family joke here to tease and harass daughter, Mandy, about her cooking prowess.

For a long time -like at least since she first married and even after Maya was born -Mandy held no interest whatsoever in much of anything pertaining to the kitchen. Once in a blue moon -a VERY blue moon at that -she might get a hankering for the "no-bake" peanut butter fudge cookies but for a long time, that was usually the extent of her venturing forth to fix something edible.

Then she discovered the ease and joy of making tacos and that became her main staple item if pushed into a corner and having to fix supper. Not that I don't like tacos or anything like that but to me, they don't constitute a meal. I'm not exactly a "meat and potatoes" kind of person but I generally prefer a bit more than a flimsy little taco to tide me over from dusk to dawn (or noon) the next day.

I've been known to joke that the main reason I recovered from two go-rounds with cancer in the past 9 years is because I had to get well to make sure the grandchildren here got fed!

But lately now -well for the past year now anyway -Mandy has taken to doing a tad more cooking -chile, lasagna, tacos yes and also this special meal of roast beef, gravy and noodles cooked in with the meat and gravy. It's a dish my late Aunt Mike used to fix and one which the kids and I tried to get her to be sure to invite us up for dinner on the occasions when she did cook that because all of us really loved that particular meal! And my Aunt did a bang-up job on it too when she fixed it. Oh Baby -talk about some good food, that was it!

Granted, Mandy doesn't have a lot of things she likes to cook as yet but any movement of hers into the kitchen area is something to be heralded, ya know. I was thinking for a while (after she made her first batch ever of Chile that we might need to refer to the kitchen area as holding the lab ovens but that was really the only thing so far that was a bit on the experimental side for the family to have to chow down. (She did get a little heavy handed in that with the chile powder!)

And it makes me feel really good too when she does offer to cook now. Not only does it give me a nice break and rest from having to fix a big meal but it also gives my brain a break too in that I don't have to come up with a new idea now every single day for our supper meal!

And the latter there is actually, I think, the part I like best!