BJ's Requested Recipes

I grew up eating wonderful food prepared by my mother, who's known to her friends as 'BJ'. Cooking was a hobby, a livelihood, and a duty for mom. It was a hobby because she loved the creativity of cooking. Given a free hour, she'd spend it in the kitchen experimenting. It was a livelihood; as a highschool home-ec teacher, she taught thousands of students over the years how to prepare healthy food. It was a duty, because her husband, who was so clever in other ways, could not assemble two ingredients without disaster. I recall his ruining a teapot in which he once attempted to make an unsupervised cup of tea. Recipients of grand nutritional benevolence as we were, Dad and I thought a normal meal consisted of at least a half-dozen dishes, and a dozen or more on Sabbath. I didn't discover until much later in life how many people eat a single dish for a single meal. So Dad and I were truly fortunate.

Mom's recipes are fashionably retro. They're all from scratch. You don't find this food in modern restaurants; you're more likely to find it in Norman Rockwell paintings--well, you would, if Rockwell painted vegetarian dinner scenes. Many recipes have been lightened calorically, but Mom has never obsessed over making her food low fat or low anything else. Her goal has always been a marriage of good nutrition with good taste. Another hallmark of BJ's cooking is that she doesn't like to include ingredients that don't forward the plot in some significant way. She laughs at fussy recipes that call for minute amounts of rare ingredients, or that needlessly complicate what should be a straightforward process. Mom's recipes are meant to impress the guest with their taste, not the maker with their complexity. They're the essence of wholesome goodness.

Mom always receives numerous recipe requests from folks who taste her cooking at hosted dinners, potlucks, and other events. This is a collection of her most frequently requested recipes, given in her own words and photographed with her own camera. Enjoy!