I wasn't always this person. I was the typical teenager; unaware, uninspired and unable to even cook my way through my mother's leftovers. Things change. Lives change and we grow up and if we're really, REALLY lucky, we get to slip out from under a blanket of ignorance into the wider bigger world that exists beyond childhood's doorstep, beyond hometown borders. That's what happened to me. But not in the way you might think... My love of cooking all started when my brother "borrowed" my bike.
You see, I've always been a saver. All the way back to age five and my first pair of Buster Brown mary-jane shoes. There was a beautiful gold plastic savings egg filled with penny candy that was a promotional aphrodisiac for children to beg, whine and otherwise erode parental resistance to buying them something - surprisingly, knowing my mother, it worked!
So there I was, saving pennies and dimes and eventually the occasional bits of paper gained at birthdays and holidays. As soon as I was able to read, my mother took me to the Marine Midland Bank so I could open my first savings account. Into the bank would go the money until eventually I'd managed to hoard an astronomical hundred plus dollars!
When I reached teenhood I realized the importance of replacing the "banana" bike of my childhood with something sensible to use for my daily "commute" between home, school and my after-school job cleaning at the bakery in our local grocery store. And given my lifetime of hoarding I could easily afford something quality like one of those new and expensive 10 speed bikes everyone was talking about.
It marked a watershed moment in my personal history as it, A) was my first major purchase [being it cost a cool hundred and twenty bucks or £53.44 - hey that was a lot of money in those days!] and B) it was the first time our family was shopping at a newly-built, but strangely named place called WAL-MART!
Now I have an older brother who was also in his teens. His talent was legend in that he crashed every used junker car my folks bought him, therefore he was always on the lookout for the next big thing in transportation and - having crashed his newest used junker car just the night before - he went straight to our mum, whining that he needed my bike to get to work (all of a whopping half-mile or so). It was a short, but heated, exchange. Me handing over the keys to the bike-lock with a stern warning about how HE would would be responsible to replace it should anything happen to it. Needless to say, I never saw my bike again...
It's really a wonder he didn't kill me that next day, given how hungover he must have been and how loud my reaction was to not find my bike. The folks claimed the loss on their homeowners insurance, which covered half of the value of the bike - and it was an uphill battle to get the rest.
I got told off for demanding he give me the balance. I'm guessing my mom scrapped up the remaining amount and gave it to him to give to me, possibly just to shut me up (I did sort of want to be a Lawyer when I was younger, all that arguing and quoting facts and asserting my rights to recovery of lost property may, I'm realizing, have been at the root of it... hmmm).
So now, with a fist-ful of money and the seasons changed to winter, (it took a lot of whining to get his half) my priorities had shifted. When next we visited WAL-MART there were a collection of lovely newly downsized "portable" televisions available. And so I decided to treat myself to a 13" b&w TV (colour was far too expensive) to enjoy in my bedroom, thereby never having to sacrifice being able to watch programs such as The Patty Duke Show or The Munsters with so unappreciative an audience as my folks who insisted Bonanza and C.H.I.P.S were far better entertaiment.
But this is where things begin to make sense because it was in this time that I found PBS or the Public Broadcasting System. And it's here that I began seeing programmes that tapped into a vein of facination with all things hands-on like DIY in This Old House - I can, to this day, tile any bathroom in the world given the number of times I watched the experts do it! And I can throw mud with the best of them; mud being the skim coat you apply to newly nailed up wall-board to cover joints and nail holes and create perfect corners for smooth walls to which you would plaster, wall-paper or paint over.
And most special to me was a lady there in the PBS wilderness who was loud and big and beautifully sensible and creative and passionate and good, I mean really GOOD, at teaching people to be more adventurous and creative in the kitchen... and so began a tender and precious friendship with all things food related.
I found my cookery goddess of all times, Mrs Julia Child - all because I was made to lend my bike to my reckless brother... See, it's true - sometimes when one garage door closes, it truly can open a window into a whole new world that stays with you for a lifetime!
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