Meanwhile, Back in the Kitchen

Tom got me Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans  for Christmas last year.  Although I enjoyed reading through it, I hadn't picked it up to make anything from it. Not sure why. That sort of thing happens when you've got stacks of cookbooks everywhere. I finally cracked it open for actual use when I picked up some shrimp a couple of weeks ago and wanted to make something besides the same old thing . (Although I see that the shrimp scampi I usually favor isn't here ... I must share that soon!) Who cooks shrimp better than someone from Louisiana? Probably no one. This was a huge hit. I'm a wimp so I used less than the minimum amounts of cayenne and red pepper. In retrospect the minimums probably would have been fine. There is a wide latitude for spicy food, of course, so take your best guess! Spicy Cajun Shrimp Makes 2-3 servings (It served 4 of us with leftovers) 2 dozen large shrimp, or 1 pound medium shrimp, fres

A year later, my father’s job took our family to Wales, where I attended, for a few months, a large school in a mid-size industrial city. There, students brought ingredients from home and learned to follow recipes, some simple and some not-so-simple, eventually making vegetable soups and meat and potato pies from scratch. It was the first time I had ever really cooked anything. I remember that it was fun, and with an instructor standing by, it wasn’t hard. Those were deeply empowering lessons, ones that stuck with me when I first started cooking for myself in earnest after college. I knew a lot about cooking when I took Home Ec back in the 9th grade. But I didn't know anything about sewing, budgeting, planning a project, or the many other things that I learned in that class. I look at my children's friends and almost all of them don't know a thing about cooking. Or a lot of those other things. This New York Times article focuses more than I'd like on obesity as a rea