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Meet the Cook: tsmith

Posted By Suzanne McMinn On April 30, 2011 @ 1:03 am In Blog,Meet the Cook | 3 Comments

Say hello to tsmith from Arizona!

Q. What are your favorite things to cook?

I love to cook and bake. My favorite things to cook are one dish meals for the easy clean up.

Q. How/when did you learn to cook?

I grew up watching my Mom and Grandma cook. My Grandparents would come stay with us for 3 months during the winter and we would do all of our Christmas baking. I can remember being in the kitchen helping with all of the baked goods. Then, during the summer we would go stay with my Grandparents for 2 weeks. There was nothing in the world like Grandma’s cooking. We would be eating green beans that we had picked out of the garden, just picked corn from the neighbor’s field, just dug potatoes and, of course, all the tomatoes and cucumbers we could eat. Not to mention the huge freezer in the basement packed full of cookies, bars, desserts and ice cream. Every day there was something going on in the kitchen that we were helping with. I started cooking everything from scratch a couple years ago when my son was diagnosed with a food allergy. Before that I had more of the semi-homemade cooking approach. I had to rethink my entire way of cooking. I really enjoy it now. I now know exactly what goes in to my cooking and I am doing it all myself. It is kind of empowering.

Q. Tell us about some of your cooking triumphs.

I consider a triumph as anything I can get my super picky daughter to eat without complaining too terribly much! One thing that I am quite proud of myself for is grilling. I have recently started to use the outdoor grill after many, many years of being banned. I was banned due to the hockey puck-like quality of the food coming off the grill. Not to mention a couple of blazing fires, but we are not going to get into that. The point is, I grilled and there were no fires and no hockey pucks. It was edible and it was good. I also canned some strawberry and blueberry jam for the first time last year.

Q. What was your most memorable cooking tragedy?

I have had some near tragedies and have been able to salvage them. Like last Thanksgiving, we had the turkey cooking in the roaster oven in the garage. I opened up the door to go check on the turkey and stepped into a cloud of smoke! I was having visions of opening the roaster lid and seeing a bird on fire! I started panicking! What am I going to feed these 20 very hungry family members! They aren’t going to be very happy with a meatless Thanksgiving! I might be banned from all holidays. Is that really a BAD thing?? Oh, yeah, where is the fire extinguisher? I am happy to say the turkey was not on fire and I am still welcome at family gatherings.

Q. Describe your kitchen. Do you love it, hate it, and why?

I love my kitchen! Is it everything I want in a kitchen? No. I still love it and its wonderful cabinets filled with wonderful kitchen stuff and my granite counter tops that I cannot destroy. I have given those counter tops a run for their money! If I ever have a kitchen that I build, I would add a walk-in pantry. You can never have enough storage space in a kitchen!

Q. Is your pantry organized and are your kitchen drawers tidy? We need to know.

Yes and no. I have items in my pantry grouped together and somewhat organized, but I have been known to lose a few things in there. My drawers are not the neatest, but they are functional.

Q. Do you have any favorite family cooking traditions?

I love holiday traditions. I have been working over the past several years to establish our own family traditions with our children. With all of our family nearby, it is quite a balancing act to still keep my husband’s family traditions, my family traditions and develop our own family traditions. The biggest one is holiday baking. I hope that my kids enjoy the holiday baking with my mom and me as much as I did with my mom and grandma.

Q. What is the one gadget (or ten) you couldn’t do without in your kitchen?

I have to pick?!? That is so unfair to all of my beloved kitchen gadgets! I love them all!

Q. If you had to take one food to a deserted island, what would it be?

I think it would have to be bread. As long as I could bake it. There is nothing like fresh baked bread.

Q. What is your go-to comfort food?

Grandma’s meatballs and gravy. My mouth is starting to water just thinking about it. We have tried to recreate it, but it just isn’t the same. There is just something about Grandma’s cooking. My Grandma turns 90 this spring and every time we travel to South Dakota for a visit, that is the first meal she cooks for us and oh, boy, is it worth waiting for!

Some of tsmith’s favorite recipes that she’s contributed to Farm Bell Recipes include:

Homemade Evaporated Milk
Sweetened Condensed Milk



See all of tsmith’s recipes!


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