Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

When I was a child I felt sorry for kids whose moms made "meat and potatoes" dinners. That was until I heard of moms who were vegetarians. I thought that was tragic.

I think I was about eleven when I discovered vegetarianism from a student teacher who was raising her children to be vegetarians. No hamburgers on the grill? No hot dogs at baseball games? No chicken parm sandwiches on Sunday night? What kind of a mother does that to her children? I wondered. If it weren't for my mom's meatball sandwiches, I don't think I would have made it through middle school.

Then one day several years later, I did the unthinkable. I became a vegetarian; not because I wanted to ruin my children's lives (I don't have children), but because of an unfortunate incident with some tainted chicken. I didn't eat meat for years after that.

I do eat meat now, but I still love vegetarian meals which I eat several times a week. For those of you who wonder whether or not a vegetable stew can be as satisfying as beef stew, I'm telling you, Yes, it can.

With Thanksgiving around the corner, my wife and I have started talking about the menu. Mostly we want to enjoy favorite dishes. One of those is a turkey liver pate I adapted from a chopped liver recipe my mom made when I was a kid.

Even people who love chicken livers view turkey liver as too much of a good thing. Whoever has the job of prepping the turkey on Thanksgiving Day frequently looks with bewilderment at the large double-lobed liver in the bag tucked ever so neatly inside the turkey.

Following my mother's lead, my solution is to turn lemons into lemonade or, in this case, turkey liver into pâté. My mother prepared chopped liver using a shallow wooden bowl and a beat-up, double-handled, single-bladed mezzaluna knife that her mother had given her.

She would cut up and sauté the turkey liver with a chopped up onion. Two eggs would go into boiling water. Once hard-boiled, they would join the sautéed liver and onion in the wooden bowl, which she would hand to me along with the mezzaluna. While she prepared the turkey, she put me to work.

When I was growing up in England in the fifties and sixties, there was a snack called a flapjack that could be occasionally bought at bakeries but was more often found in homes, served up by diligent housewives. It was never found at my home: the only time my mother turned on the stove was to light a cigarette. But some of my friends’ mothers did make them, and the sweet, buttery smell of freshly baked flapjacks is one of those childhood aromas that still haunt me today.

Now, for the American reader a point of clarification is required. British flapjacks bear absolutely no resemblance to American ‘flapjacks’, which seems to be just another word for pancakes. The British flapjack is a unique item unto itself, but if a comparison is required, I suppose a granola bar would come closest in look and texture. But it is simpler, more elemental, only requiring four ingredients (long before Michael Pollan came up with his five ingredient mantra): oats, sugar, butter and golden syrup.

It's that time of year again when everyone is ready to jump onto the get-fit wagon. I could easily say that I should include myself in that group, but I believe it's best to start by taking small steps before diving into a plan that you might not keep up. My first step for the New Year is a healthy one, it's simply to eat more healthy foods, like whole grains and to limit my intake of sugar. I actually love whole grains, but I just don't eat them often enough. Luckily my only downfall sugar-wise is chocolate, so it's easy for me to exclude sweets and candies entirely. But I've recently found myself using agave syrup as my choice of sweetener. That was my first step, what's yours?

Eating whole grains doesn't just mean switching your morning toast from white to wheat. It means eating actual whole grains preferably in their minimally processed forms. In place of white rice try brown. Eat steel-cut oats rather than instant. Try some different whole grains, like amaranth, millet, buckwheat, barley, or bulgur. Bulgur is one of my favorites. If you've ever had Middle Eastern or Turkish food, you've probably already eaten bulgur without knowing. The salad tabbouleh and the meatballs called kofta or kefteh are made with bulgur. It's not an unrecognizable grain, bulgur is actually wheat.