What’s your favourite childhood recipe?
What’s your ‘go to recipe’? This is a question I get asked quite a bit and I am never sure how to answer it.
It depends on my mood, what’s in the fridge and if I am cooking for someone else.
For myself, I love making spaghetti with chilli, garlic and pinenuts with loads of fresh parmesan cheese grated over it. It is delicious, quick and easy – I have lost count of the times I have eaten this dish.
Another dish I cook when I am out of ideas is a simple quiche – I happen to love quiche but not when it tastes ‘eggy’. That happens with most ready-made versions in supermarkets as the egg mix is used to bulk the quiche up rather than filling it proportionately.
As I am rather fond of a good risotto, you might get served one when you visit me – the beauty of a rice dish is the many ways you can change it. Fry some mushrooms or roast butternut squash and add it towards the end of cooking and et voila, you have a tasty dish done in no time.
When it comes to desserts, I tend to use semolina a lot (again, when I haven’t had a chance to go shopping). Depending on how you make it, it can be a set pudding or more of a sweet soup and the taste can be adjusted with fruit and flavourings.
My mum used to make me a semolina ‘soup’ when I was sick as a kid – I hated porridge (she used to stir in a raw egg at the end of cooking to aid recovery – I still shudder when I think about it). At least she knew I was eating the soup.
When my mum wanted to treat us kids, she would make rice pudding and she served it with a mix of white sugar and cinnamon – still my preferred way of eating rice pudding (you sprinkle the sugar mix over the rice while eating it).
As much as I loved it, I never made it for myself (I couldn’t say why I never tried making it) but I found now a place that makes the rice pudding very similar to my mum and they even mix sugar and cinnamon when you ask. Head to Blarney Castle Hotel if you like a good rice pudding. When my mum didn’t have rice, she made something she called ‘milk noodles’ – pasta cooked in sweet milk. Bear with me – it is actually quite nice. You heat milk, butter and sugar and add pasta (my mum always used spiral pasta) and slowly cook the pasta in the milk mix (and it tastes delicious with sugar and cinnamon sprinkled over).
People normally stare in utter disbelief when I tell them about childhood dishes and say that my mum made milk noodles (milchnudeln). These were my mum’s go to recipes when my dad was not at home (he hated rice pudding and milk noodles so we never ate it when he was home).
As my dad loved stews, my mum became an expert in making stew (we had it so many times that I still dislike anything resembling stew).
I remember when we travelled to England, my uncle asked her to cook gallons of stews for him to freeze and eat whenever he fancied a ‘proper’ stew as he called it. My mum loved cooking for my uncle and he appreciated her go to recipes.