What made you start cooking? A guest blog by Jeremy Leinen aka Chef Boy ‘R Mine

I’m sure many chefs get asked the question all the time of how they found their way into the kitchen. There are a few of the usual stories that get shared but it’s not always the cookie-cutter story of helping mom or grandma.

For me, it’s half typical and half not. At a pretty young age, I was helping my mom make bread- I think I was six years old. It was the Betty Crocker Cookbook and I recall using a standard white bread. A side story is that this bread got an unlikely nickname as “the bread with the hole in the top.” To explain, my mom was apparently in a hurry one time she made it and didn’t form the dough firmly enough when placing it into the loaf pan, leaving a pocket of air where the dough was folded. This resulted in a hole in each slice of bread, and thus the name. Despite its technical shortfall, it was very tasty bread. In addition to that recipe, we also made a recipe from the book for a potato dough called “Refrigerator Roll Dough.” I still use this recipe from time to time, as I find it very easy to work with and it’s very forgiving with its overnight proof in the refrigerator. After a couple of years of helping her, by the time I was nine or ten, I made the bread myself for Thanksgiving. The following year, I was probably too ambitious for my own good and failed at attempting to make croissants. There were tears and some butter angrily thrown into the trash can when I couldn’t get it to cooperate, but making bread with Mom is otherwise one of my fonder childhood memories. I also helped Mom with making pies, which were sometimes simple with store-bought pie shells, but not always- Mom got pretty serious about pie sometimes. She also made a yearly batch of what she referred to as “killer chili,” which is based around a more traditional “Chile con Carne” and not this ground beef and beans nonsense that gets sold in a can. Mom made chili that took a couple of days and $100, and that’s when $100 was actually worth something.

Encounter with a stranger I never saw again

The woman was sobbing as they rolled my gurney into the hospital room.  Her curtain was pulled so I couldn’t see her, but her sobs would have been heartbreaking had I not been in a state of euphoria.

I had just given birth to my miracle baby.  It was a miracle we conceived him.  It was a miracle when I sensed something wrong and went to my OB’s office.  It was a miracle my OB was out of town and another doctor with much smaller hands ended up tying the knot in the cervical cerclage stitch that closed my cervix and kept me pregnant.  It was a miracle that I was in labor for 9 weeks and the drugs kept me pregnant long enough for him to be viable.  It was a miracle that he was born 9 ½ weeks early and suffered little complications.  That’s no big deal now, but in 1985 that was a miracle.

The Great Beet Adventure of 1981

Don’t even think about feeding me a beet.  It’s not going to happen. 

Tom Robbins is a favorite author of mine. Tom thought highly of beets.  Let me just quote him for a moment:

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins

Yes, Tom thought highly of beets. 

Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash

So did my father, I think.  Although I don’t remember ever seeing him eat a beet before that fateful summer.  He may have initially planted them for my mother who liked pickled beets.  Which are, arguably, the worst of all the beets.

My Grief Lives in My Lungs

Grief lives in my lungs.  My lungs temper my grief – keep me upright, keep me alive, keep breathing…putting one foot in front of the other.  Grief lives in my lungs.

I had quit smoking in the months before my dad died.  I had tried so many times to quit smoking and this time seemed to be working.  Oh sure, I had cravings, but I was managing them. 

My mother called, “Come quick. It’s an emergency.”  Part of me knew.  I stopped breathing.

And then, I went tearing down the hill after putting shoes on.  Normally I would have gone barefoot. I don’t know why the shoes. In case we had to go to the hospital? Part of me knew.

I was breathing hard by the time I got to the house. Shallow, unsatisfying breaths.  My father dead on the floor.  I quickly knelt and started chest compressions, went to blow air in his mouth.  Cold.  He was cold.