cook (kk)
v. cooked, cook·ing, cooks
v.tr.
1. To prepare (food) for eating by applying heat.
2. To prepare or treat by heating: slowly cooked the medicinal mixture.
3. Slang To alter or falsify so as to make a more favorable impression;
doctor: disreputable accountants who were paid to cook the firm's books.

The latter is the definition of cooking. My mother, Karen Neu’s cooking
does meet each and every bit of the definition.

1. To prepare (food) for eating by applying heat.

Growing up the food that was made was frequently prepared using heat.
The preferred heating method in our house was boiling water. Boiling water
can heat therefore prepare, almost any food. Hamburgers for example. The
recipe is quite simple.

Boiled Hamburgers

As much ground beef for as little money possible 25/75?

Sandwich bags. The fold over kind they are cheaper and there is no risk
they might keep freezer burn out.

Antique hamburger press, because your kids think it’s cool to use and
they will make the hamburger patties.

Directions for hamburger patties

Assemble all available children. If one is not available tell the other
two they will have to do the work of the third. Usually this makes
the third child available as the two have hunted them down and
dragged them into the kitchen. Let the children argue over who gets
to use the hamburger press until one of them gets their finger
smashed in it. The one with the smashed finger is hamburger press
operator as consolation for the smashed finger.

Grab a handful of ground beef and complain how gross it feels. Then form
it into a ball, about the size of a small apple.

Put the ball into the sandwich bag. Fold over the top of the bag.

Place the balled and bagged meat on to hamburger press and close the
press, open and voila the prefect looking hamburger patty. Unless of
course your “meatball” was too big and some meat has oozed out of the
top of the bag in the “pressing” process. One does not however put
this in a redo pile, it’s just too hard to get the plastic separated
from the meat especially if the bag wrinkled and folded while being
pressed. This patty it just gets placed in the patty pile.

Place all hamburger patties in freezer. Let freeze and forget about
them.

Instructions for cooking

In large skillet fill ¼ to ½ with water and let boil.

Remove hamburger patties from freezer. There is no need to scrape of the
accumulated ice or freezer burn as this adds a special flavor that
only comes from freezer burn and freezer formed ice.

Remove patties from bags and place in boiling water. Sometimes the patty
gets stuck in the bag because the bag has frozen into the meat or was
damaged in the pressing process. No worries just put the whole thing
bag and all in the boiling water.

Boil until hamburgers get a nice grey color about ten minutes or when
ever you remember you are cooking them or if the pan boils dry and
you hear an unusual frying sound coming from the kitchen.

Remove hamburgers from pan and place on white bread.
Quickly place a cheese food product on top of hamburger so it melts
enough to stick for this cooking method makes food cool down faster.
To eat put on as many condiments as possible for both flavor enhancer
and reducer.

You will find one side of your hamburger is really, really soggy from
the hamburger being placed directly on it hot out of the boiling
water. If your bread has not dissolved completely and merely returned
to it dough state. Eat with that side up. However if you find your
bread completely missing it can be replaced if you so choose. But
always remember the dog must not be fed from the table however if
“the dog has not been out for awhile.” Pretend as though you forgot
to put your hamburger down because it is delicious and rub your belly
and say how good dinner was upon your return to the table.

Boiled hamburgers make for a nice and easy dinner. If however you only
wanted a snack then the second part of the cooking definition applies.

2. To prepare or treat by heating

Peanut butter spoons were a specialty of my Mother’s. The cooking for this
is an on going process. To make, take a teaspoon or tablespoon stick it in
the peanut butter and with a scooping motion remove enough peanut butter to
satisfy your hunger. The peanut butter is not cooked in the traditional
sense. The peanut butter is in a huge tub stored over the stove. Over the
stove in many houses is an ok place to put things. However, with all the
boiling and burning that happened on our stove. Over the stove was not a
place for anything that might be consumed. The peanut butter sat over the
stove and was slowly steamed and heated by what was on the stove. We did
not have the problem of little bits of jelly and bread accumulating in the
peanut butter that some people have. The foreign food particles that would
have accumulated just got slowly steamed into the peanut butter and so our
peanut butter had an ever-changing taste and no spoon or tub tasted the
same.

Another favorite snack I could never stomach was milk toast. Fill a glass
2/3 with milk. Toast white bread. My Mother’s idea of toasted bread is
bread that has been passed over the toaster just to warm it up. Put very
generous amount of “tub butter” aka margarine on your warm bread and smash
it down into the milk with a spoon. After waiting an appropriate amount of
time eat the “toast” out of the glass of milk, which now has little yellow
oil slicks on top, with your spoon. When all the “toast” is consumed drink
the remainder of the now yellowed milk.

We had some defensive strategies in place to combat my Mother’s
continuous war with food. This on going battle would fall into the third
definition of cooking.

3.Slang To alter or falsify so as to make a more favorable impression;

My brother, sister and I usually ate without my parents. We would be served
a culinary delight such as burned fish sticks and peas. The peas yes were
also burned. Vegetables in our house were always frozen always boiled and
always drowned in margarine. Frequently however the vegetables were put on
to boil and then forgotten and the pot would boil dry and thus the carbon
seasoning was added. I decided at a very young age I would not flavor my
food with that seasoning. I think carbon was the only seasoning used by my
mother. We had little bottles of spices that were probably part of some
wedding present. But they were preserved in their original packaging, over
the stove next to the peanut butter, to be donated to science upon the
death of our family from either starvation or food poisoning.

I digress, back to peas and other unsuspecting vegetables. Instead of
trying to pour out the vegetables that were only smoked with that unique
carbon flavor. My mom would scrape the bottom of the pan releasing the
crunchy carbon vegetables and mix them with the smoked ones to make sure we
all got our vegetables.

My siblings and I would sit down to dinner and very discretely one of us
would let the dog out and one of us would crack a window. There is an art
to feeding the dog your dinner. You can’t dump it all at once because if
Mom should come back in we should be in different stages of our dinner
consumption. You also have to be really careful about the food group, dips,
sauces and condiments. They cannot get smeared on the windowsill or drip
down the outside of the house, especially in winter. You also have to be
careful not to let any dip or other item from that food group land on any
part of the dog the dog can’t lick off. Thus we falsified the eating of our
dinner by feeding it to the dog. We altered my mother’s belief that she was
feeding and nourishing her children. The favorable out come being having a
fat dog that didn’t eat dog food and undernourished children?

At the time I believed this defensive tactic of “altering and falsifying”
so we would have a “favorable” outcome was good and just. We did not want
our kitchen to be turned into a library. If she believed she had to feed us
then the kitchen could stay and we would be able to assemble in the late,
late hours of the night and eat cereal.

I realize now we were only enablers and carbon is not an actual seasoning.
Perhaps if our kitchen were a library we could have started the twelve
steps to our recovery sooner because there might have been a cook book in
it but probably not.

Emily Davies
emilyjdavies@yahoo.com