I always joked that when my mother returned home that September day in 1970 after driving me to college in New London, Connecticut (Connecticut College, class of '74 , thank you) she did a happy dance. A BIG happy dance. Possibly she tangoed around the apartment with Howard. Because for the first time in mumblety-mumble years, Mom no longer had to cook dinner for anyone.

Now, my sister had gone off to college in '68, and I'm guessing mom did a discreet little happy dance but she couldn't let it all out because she still had one high schooler hanging around the house. She trusted me enough that at one time, she left me alone for a week or more as she had to show up at Goddard College for a time. She was pursuing a degree and while most of it was independent study, they required that you be there for a week or so. And I was trustworthy, yeah, I really was. But we all "came of age" in the 50s, where the dads worked and the moms cooked and did house things. In our house, that was true to a great extent but remember, my parents divorced when I was 13, was it? And my sister and I learned to cook because Mom worked and got home later than we did from school. We were the dreaded "latchkey" kids. And we managed exceptionally well.

While I was growing up, I remember that sort of standard play; fathers didn't cook except maybe when we fired up the back-yard drill/ barbecue thing and then they were in charge. Mmmm, Men. Do. Meat. And my dad at least had one star turn – his spaghetti sauce was nirvana to me and he used to make it for me and freeze it when I was in college so I could have some. Maybe I brought it back to Mom's and we cooked it. But Mom, like most moms of that generation, was the family cook. And I remember our kitchen on Simpson Street and I remember lamb chops and roast beef, stewed chicken and hamburgers, pot roast and BLTs (we didn't keep kosher), chicken with breadcrumbs and potatoes baked on the stove in a little potato baking gadget. Frozen veggies – green beans with almonds, spinach (which we all loved), winter squash, peas, lima beans (I happen to like all beans, even those) and succotash, iceberg lettuce with Russian dressing. I remember (thanks to a conversation a few days ago with a stranger) that we had a drawer that was the breadbox/breadkeeper – a deep drawer with a metal pierced cover that slid. I remember the stove on Robin Road that actually slid under a sort of shelf when not in use. I remember marble rye from the local deli. We went out for Chinese food (don’t ask) and pizza, but mom cooked. Every day. Every night. For years and years.

Turns out, Mom HATED cooking. What surprises me about this so much is that despite this, she was a really good cook. She wasn't hugely creative, but she really had a great range of recipes and we had yummy leftovers and the meals were good. She and I spent years trying to find a good meatloaf recipe and I'm sorry I never got to make her the one that is a regular in our house now. We even cooked "at home" on vacation; going to the same very nice but inexpensive motel on Cape Cod for years. It was clean and nice and friendly and nothing fancy but it had a kitchen, so we ate dinner out (lobster, yum) but had other meals at the motel to save money.)

But her food was good. There are recipes I use today without alteration that I learned from mom. There are recipes I use today WITH alterations that I learned from Mom. My pot roast is fabulous because I use a better cut of meat than one usually does for this dish. Despite arguments from meat department dudes who say it's too lean, I use meat that is higher quality. I've tried the cheaper cuts and I get greasy food. I don't like greasy food. It's simple stuff but it's good. I can't make her bean and barley soup because I haven't found that particular mix and, more to the point, Stu's not a fan of barley. Nor split pea soup though I wish I could make it just once to see. But I hate being told to try something I have never liked. There's enough other food out there.

When you consider too that Mom did not rely on herbs and spices for the most part, that she didn't know what most of that stuff tasted like because the spice rack in our house was a museum piece, a wall decoration, it's testimony to her talent as a cook that her stuff was good and that I make it today. My sister no longer eats meat or she probably would as well. I have a handful of recipes in Mom's writing – that sour cream coffee cake is fantastic but I can't STIR it any longer (I know there are ways, but it's just Not The Same.)

Last week, in a desire for comfort, I made mom's stuffed cabbage. It's a great, simple flavorful pot of food that smells wonderful – does not make the house smell like cooked cabbage and tastes better the second day. I posted about this on Facebook and wow, did a lot of people write back about their version, or how they loved or hated stuffed cabbage. Over the years, it's become individualized. Grandma used "sour salt". I never did because I could never find it after I began living on my own and/or living in a situation where making a big pot of food made sense. California groceries did not carry "sour salt" and I assumed it no longer existed. WRONG. Google "sour salt" and you will find it. Just like it exists in the pantry in my mother's kitchen right now. It's citric acid. Oh. No idea if it was Mom or Gladys who had that and for how long since to the best of my knowledge, it has one purpose in cooking. And Mom had not cooked, even that dish – ESPECIALLY that dish – in decades.

The rice got changed to brown rice, and over the years, became jasmine or brown or what do we have here? The cans of tomatoes sometimes have green chiles, but not usually. I tend to stay with the basics. Although….adding sun-dried tomatoes, or adding a chipotle or cascabel pepper for subtle flavor works. And of course, herbs if we have them. And of course, fill in our blank here "sweet and sour". On a recent trip to "oh we have mussed you so) Rein's deli in Vernon, CT (yet another story) I saw a menu entry for stuffed cabbage seasoned with raisins and gingersnaps. Okay. Sure. Maybe some day.

I was a college student before I tasted oregano. The pizza joints where we lived were curiously lackluster when it came to things like oregano or basil; an enterprising student at my school crated grinders (subs to some of you, poor boys, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. yeah yeah) and sold them dorm to dorm before he was stopped. He missed his "home" cooking as I recall and late at night, studying, an Italian sub was so damn welcome. And dorm food was, well, dorm food. Oregano! Wow.

I was in my '30s I think before I knew that paprika (and yo, Emeril? It's not "papperika") existed to do more than decorate chicken breasts of mashed potatoes or mac and cheese. It had actual flavor. Really it did. But when your jar of paprika contained the same powder that came with the thing, maybe, oh I dunno, when you got married? Moved into the house on Simpson Street? It would be sort of what we call Dead. Most sincerely dead. Orange powder for whitish food. Salt and pepper, but I can't recall ever using the pepper. We had a pepper grinder, and one of my regular stories is about how we ran out one night. I'm not exactly sure but I believe I was about 15 and after searching for what was probably a jar or tin of peppercorns, and having come to the conclusion that we were really out, Mom tried to remember when it was she'd last bought peppercorns. To the best of her ability, she believed it was before I was born. See where I'm going with this?

One Thanksgiving I the late 80s, when I was back in the Boston area (I lived there from '85 to 90 when Stu and I moved to Seattle, Mom exhausted herself prepping for Thanksgiving dinner. After fighting over who was to vacuum (neither of us should have, she insisted and wiped out all her energy for the rest of the afternoon, as I recall0 we were talking over the menu and the timing and Mom had a small panic when she realized that Oh NO, Horror of HORRORS, we were out of Bells' Seasoning. And one cannot make a roast turkey with stuffing with out Bell's seasoning. Bell's seasoning came in a little yellow cardboard box and was used pretty much once a year. Yeah. YEAAAH. But it was part of the recipe. Every year. And it was part of a great meal. And by this time, I'd learned all about herbs and spices. I'd discovered bulk, and thus fresh, stuff in the Berkeley co-op and later in Cambridge's tiny co-op. Hell, even more to the point, I GREW herbs and learned what fresh parsley could add to a dish. I grew basil, and oregano, parsley and more basil (have you ever made basil vinegar with the opal basil/purple basil? Oh wow. In Berkeley, my annual basil was perennial as it never got cold enough. Poor confused little thing.

I tried very hard not to laugh because again, this stuff was beyond useless. Herbs and especially spices do not last in cardboard. It's intended for this one major use – heck ithe little yellow box has a turkey on it. The thing is that it's easily reproduced. According to the website for this stuff (yes, they still make it!) it is a blend of rosemary, oregano, sage, ginger, and marjoram. Ok, I mean come on. Ginger? Blindfolded, I bet no one could have tasted the ginger. Or in fact anything else. And given that the remaining herbs are found in most spice racks (but in jars that probably have been sitting since the dawn of time….) it was, I swore, easy to reproduce and she would not know the difference. Who knows? Mom was not a big fan of turkey. In fact she made the thing primarily so she could have the stuffing and the mashed potatoes we traditionally served with the turkey. So I mixed up/combined the (probably taste-free) stuff I could find in her kitchen – the oregano, sage and rosemary that I'm sure were in the little spire jars that had been around since [fill in your blank here] promising her I could match the Bell's seasonings completely. Did it work? Who knows? Was it the same? Hell no, or rather hell yes since it was made of the same dried green leafy thingies that had lived for years in the yellow cardboard box that we hauled out once a year. Dinner was delicious. I remember nothing of what we had but I know, because she was a fine cook, that it was. She liked food, mind you but cooking? When she was through she was really through

Mom and Howard ate out just about every single night of their lives together. They never lived together, not ever, and if Howard had his way, he'd have had the kitchen pulled out of his condo because it was a useless waste of space. I don't even know that he ever made a cup of tea there. Stu tells me that at Mom's condo currently, the oven is a storage bin for pots and pans. She was thrilled to bits when grocery stores began offering food at counters so you could get a pint of this and a cup of that. Whole Foods was a great help to her, as was the microwave. I just have always found it interesting that someone could hate something and still do it so well. And I bet from time to time she still managed to do a few steps of her "I don't have to cook" happy dance.