Memory Monday: Cooking, Mother, and Tempura

My Mother

COOKING, MOTHER, AND TEMPURA

The way my mother cooked and the way I cook are different. There are a few of her recipes that I still make, like Swiss steak and beef stew—although, I have altered both as far as seasonings go, as well as beef enchiladas–which you can only make the right way with Morton’s chili blend. From me, she learned to make rump roast in a way that it is so tender that it falls apart.

But this weekend, my cooking abilities were stretched to almost breaking (at least, for a while). Here is the short version.

Yesterday, we celebrated my son-in-law’s birthday and Father’s Day—my husband’s thirty-fifth and my son-in-law’s first. In our family, the person whose special day we are celebrating gets to choose what we will have for our family dinner. In the past with things being equal (birthday vs Father’s Day), our son-in-law usually got to choose and we often had fried catfish. This year, he decided to pick Papa Murphy’s Pizza (my husband’s favorite), but he also requested tempura vegetables (one of his favorites and something I had tried making recently with a mix I found at Homeland).

I sliced and diced the veggies he requested—green beans, carrots, taro root, asparagus, and daikon radish. All set—right? Wrong! I went back to the store where I got the tempura mix (I only had a half of a box left), and they didn’t have ANY—not even a place on the shelf where it had sold out. I checked other stores, same thing. By the way, this was on Saturday and everyone was coming for Sunday Dinner. So, I got googled “recipes tempura” and got a ton of sites. I started checking them out and decided on a couple that I would try. Sunday while the pizzas were baking, I mixed up the half package and started frying a few of each kind of veggies. By the time, I had finished using the half box of tempura mix, the pizzas were ready. I decided we had enough veggies prepared and closed my laptop without using any of those recipes I had researched so frantically. It turned out that I had fixed plenty. There were even a few leftovers.

I wonder if Mother would ever make tempura veggies if she had ever tried them. Somehow, I think not. They just don’t go with the meat and potato meals that she always seemed to make for her family.

Now, my daughter is a different matter. She makes so many different things. Maybe someday when she takes over doing the special family dinners, she will introduce us to a new set of recipes.