This isn’t an amazing picture at all! The importance of this picture is to show most of my cookbooks and the stories behind them. Many of them are from our 2008 study abroad when my husband took U.S. students to Italy to do a documentary on Italian food.
My job on these trips were to help students stay with the group during tours. If you haven’t heard the term herding cats, nailing jelly to the wall or pouring water into a sieve you should try to keep thirty young adults following one person who is talking in a normal voice about what took place a thousand years ago while there are cars and motorcycles zipping by, tens or twenty different directions they could go, windows filled with pastries, clothes, perfumes, art, jewelry, or things they have not seen before and you will totally understand the before mentioned phrases.
I was grateful that I have an uncanny ability to know how to get to places I have been told about, read about or drove by it once. In these travels I have been pulled away from the group by following a student who just had to go the bathroom, tied a shoe, just had to take a picture and probably a dozen other things and I have never lost a student and found the group in a timely matter. I have had one misstep but it wasn’t all my fault and I will leave that for another photo later on. I will tell you I have never lived it down and every time we get together with our Italian director, him and my husband love to retell the tale.
I have gotten off track and need to bring it back to the cookbooks. I have really came into my own after that trip and finding all these cookbook neatly stacked in my kitchen. First, you should know we did buy them ourselves and let the students use them. Second, I realized I could make a recipe my own, meaning taking a recipe and adding this or that to it and it still be good. I had always known I could do that with baking as long as I didn’t throw off the fats, dry ingredients and liquids balance. I can bake for anyone but now I felt I could cook for Americans and do a pretty good job of making something that they would like, for Europeans I know I should make something less sweet (no applesauce with the pork but greens.) I can cook for Asians but I am not sure how to bake for them. Sad to say I have never had the opportunity to cook for anyone from Africa. I haven’t hosted them in my home…yet. I always do research on food from their area before we host someone. I never tell them it is their food because no one can cook exactly like their family. Example, I cooked what I thought was Chinese and our Chinese guest said “What do you call this Kim? It almost taste like Chinese.” Being that our guest was from Szechuan province and their spice level was quite a bit higher than ours I took that as a compliment. We had a guest from Slovenia who said she loved everything that came out my large saucepan.
These cookbooks gave me the experience to experiment and I fell in love with cooking just as much as baking. Our friends noticed a difference. I have always had about a half a dozen recipes for a dinner that I used repeatedly. When I started mixing it up they took notice. When we started donating dinners our community notice that I was not just a chocolate nut or a baker. I have had two articles written about me on those subjects. I make my own truffles and for our Christmas party each year I would make about a dozen different cookies, a half a dozen bars, a half dozen other pastries plus a dozen different chocolates. I did offer other non-sweet items. The first few years of our marriage it was all store bought with a few personal bakes. I kept challenging myself to go bigger until it got too big. To make us feel a little better about all this over indulgence everyone invited were to bring dry goods for the food pantry in town.
I look forward to sharing my recipes with you as time goes on. This past last month we have been travelling. I hope to get my photo albums up soon. We traveled through eleven states. North Dakota was our 48th contiguous state to visit and we got to it this time. We also got to see the head waters of the Mississippi river and I got to stand in it. I was so excited. We stayed in a cabin without a television, even more important no internet. We taught ourselves a new game of cards and the silence almost drove my husband nuts. I have to say I did miss the internet. I wish you all safe travels even if it is just to the grocery store to buy a new ingredient.