The Secret Ingredient by Bonnie

The Secret Ingredient

by Bonnie Ramsburg

I have no recipes to share for our Immortal Beloveds Issue. I hate to cook, hate to bake, so I don’t develop my own personal collection like some people do — I collect recipes and cookbooks like they are going out of style though. My mom, on the other hand, loves to cook and bake. She passed that love onto my brother, Kevin, and he’s a pretty darn good cook too. He likes to experiment with different spices and ideas. “Why don’t I ask them for recipes?” you ask. Simply put, my mom is old school. She can look in the exact same cabinet that I do, and pull stuff out to make a meal that is good and fulfilling; yet when I look in it, I see nothing to put together. Mom cooks what I call comfort food, so what she makes is from years of making — no recipes, no amounts written down. It’s the basics, she knows what goes in it, and goes from there. When it’s time to add the spices, she knows it’s right by smell, look, texture, and taste-testers. We never have the same dish twice it seems, Mom has made more than one dish that we’ve enjoyed immensely, but we will never have it again because it was a mistake, or she was just throwing stuff together for a meal. Kevin is the same way with his cooking, but he does more modern cooking. My Mom has made homemade noodles to go in homemade chicken noodle soup, homemade beef stew, and homemade meatball soup. She has no recipe for these noodles. So my brother and I can’t even try to duplicate them. But even though she dislikes eating soups and some stews, she will usually willingly make these dishes for us so we can enjoy the noodles. She wasn’t going to make them one time — she was going to go buy some and my 6 foot tall brother blocked the door and wouldn’t let her leave, because he wanted homemade noodles. She made them, just because he wanted them. My Mom also loves to bake. She gets a baking bug bite sometimes and we enjoy the sweet delicacies she makes for days afterwards. I love her chocolate chip cookies, and most people would say, “You can make them yourself. She just uses the Nestle Toll House recipe on the back of the package.” And they would be right, I could. But Mom’s taste so much better. Just like most of the stuff she makes. Now at the beginning, I said I hated to cook and bake, and it’s true. I do have a couple of things I enjoy making, usually. My deviled eggs have been fought over at work functions before, and I enjoy making a quick dessert that has been featured in the magazine — Multiple Choice Bars — for the friends. Through them, as testers, I found a combination that tastes the best.

Most of the time, I’d say 99% of the time, our dishes turn out pretty good. We enjoy making them and sharing them. Then there is that 1%, the times that they just don’t turn out the way we expected them to. They don’t taste the way we know they should and we can’t quite figure out why; and no, I’m not talking about leaving an ingredient out, like the all-important sugar in a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dinner...true! My Mom and I talked about this once before. I couldn’t figure out why something she had made, that I knew was supposed to be absolutely delicious, just didn’t deliver on my expectations. When I said something to her about it, she told me, “I didn’t really want to make it. I felt obligated to do it, so my heart wasn’t in it.” Which in turn, taught me why sometimes my dishes that I do make didn’t turn out as well as usual. My heart wasn’t in it; I had felt obligated to make them. My mom taught me an important lesson that day as we talked about recipes not tasting the same. She taught me what the Secret Ingredient to all cooking is: Love. Just Love. When you love what you are doing for your family, the taste comes through. They can tell the difference in it, even if they don’t know what or why. So my friends; read and learn, when you put your heart and love into what you are cooking, it tastes so much better than when you don’t really want to do it, but have to.

REMEMBER, LOVE IS THE SECRET INGREDIENT!