Cooking; I have to admit, that from the time I was a little boy playing with the thick aluminum pans on the floor of mom’s kitchen, I have always had a fascination with food and cooking.  Not just eating mind you, which I love oh so much, but the actual process of cooking.  Everything about food, from the artistry of how it looks on a plate, to its color, textures on the tongue and the combination flavors. I probably should have gone to culinary school and started a restaurant of my own but, no doubt, I would have ate and drank up all the profits.

Mom was a very good cook.  She made the basics and followed recipes to a tee.  I don’t ever remember a bad meal.  But Mom colored between the lines and rarely experimented with a dash of this or that.  Mom was precise; she was a registered nurse, and during certain periods of our growing up, she would have the 3PM to 11PM shift and dad would make us something to eat.  Dad, on the other hand, colored outside the lines.  Granted, he only made two things; omelets and pancakes, but he made these with flair.  He would add chocolate chips or bananas or anything else that seemed fitting to his pancakes; he would put whatever was in the fridge in his omelets, as long as there was cheese. Most of these dishes were successful, some were not, but maybe that is where I learned to experiment.

When I was in college, I often cooked for my 3 college roommates, albeit on a college student’s tight budget; always mindful of saving enough money for the important things like skiing and beer.  Sometimes, I would buy one of those large cans of Chef Boyardee; add browned ground beef, garlic, basil and other spices lying around the kitchen; serve with a wedge of iceberg lettuce and some Viva Italian along with a cheap glass of vino fino. My roommates thought I was a male Julia Child; and all for less than $2 a head.  I loved the Crockpot and experimented with everything in the slow cooker, which ideally lent itself to the skiing and college lifestyle.  You’d put everything in the pot in the morning, and it would be ready for the hungry hippos when they returned home from a day on the slopes, er college classrooms.  I tried everything from the simple pot roast, stews, roast chickens to the headier boeuf bourguignon.  I loved experimenting; I had some successes and I had some disasters.

People pleaser that I was, I quickly realized that you could win the hearts of others through cooking; that it pleased people immensely; plus it usually saved money.  Enter my bachelor years after moving back east from Colorado.  You know how the saying goes, ‘a way to a woman’s heart is through her tummy’, or something like that.  I loved to cook (and show off a little), they loved to eat. I bought my bachelors pad, for its kitchen, nestled away in Queen Village, the old section in Philadelphia near Independence Hall and bordering the famous eating and drinking strip called South Street.  A charming little brownstone built in 1842 with a kitchen to die for.  I couldn’t afford living room furniture, but the kitchen was fitted to the 9’s.  Center island cooking, beautiful pans, Sub Zero refrigerator…all the gadgetry; I was in a bachelor’s cooking heaven. 

Sharing the experience; But I digress; I jumped from my short bachelorhood of cooking and eating head-long into a relationship with Kathy. Oh man could she cook.  Up until now, I had somehow managed to date only women who couldn’t cook; who needed a man to cook for them.  Love changed all that and, alas, my cooking prowess was no longer special; and what’s more, there was now competition in the house.  I married that girl; winning each other through our love of cooking (and eating).  After we got married, Kathy cooked the lion’s share of meals, relegating me to the role of sous chef pulling out my pots and pans, only for those times we entertained or the occasional weekend dinner.  When Kathy cooks, no two days are the same; new dishes almost every night, new experimenting; never a dull moment and rarely a weak dish. When we would entertain company, we often fought over who got to cook what.  Over the years, on these occasions, it has generally evolved that I cook the entrée plus the salad, while Kathy whips up extraordinary appetizers, usually a soup and the dessert.  For a time, we even auctioned off dinners in our home for charity auctions.  We love cooking and sharing something you both love that much, makes the bond even stronger. 

Before we had our two daughters, we had a sailboat on the Chesapeake bay; we cooked up a storm on the boat every weekend; sharing our love of food and life.  Then came the kids; how the products of our genes could end up eating only 3 things is still one of life’s great mysteries; no matter how hard we tried, they would only eat grilled cheese, pizza and chicken fingers.  Kathy tried almost every day to get them to try what she and I loved so much.  These two little girls, and otherwise joys of our life, ruined just about every possibility of a good meal you could hope for.  Dining in or out, food with my little princesses was anything BUT a pleasure; for nearly 17 years, Kathy became a short order cook.  She and I would eat our version of a gourmet meal, and the girls would have pizza, chicken fingers or grilled cheese.  That’s it!  Period.  It severely limited options for going out too; please no green stuff (parsley or basil) on the pizza.

Happy Ending and the confessions of a Food Channel addict – Alas, over time, exposure to watching their parents eat and cook well, our two daughters have grown to have some pretty remarkable palates. It took each of them nearly 18 years to get there, but both not only try new things now, but they even cook!  If there is a TV on somewhere in the house, you can bet good money that someone is watching the Food Channel or a PBS cooking show.  And while I normally loathe reality TV (except for Deadliest Catch and the occasional Ice Road Trucker) I have become a closet addict of the reality cooking shows.  I almost never miss an episode of Top Chef, Hells Kitchen, Iron Chef or the Next Food Network Star.  Admitting the latter is really kind of embarrassing, as it would be more fitting if I bragged about watching every episode of Nova or the McNeil Lehrer report.  I do watch more than my share of business news, the History Channel and Discovery, but I find it a little liberating to come out of the closet and confess of this love of cooking shows.

The happy ending is that, now, when the girls are home from school, on nights like tonight; the four of us will sit together and watch the final episode of the Next Food Network Star; we will discuss flavors, textures and presentation.  We will kibitz about who did what, wrong and how the editors try to use their teasers to make you feel that the wrong person is going to get Chopped (another good cooking show).  But we will do it together, as a family.  I don’t know if it was the genes, the environment, the cooking shows, or what finally got the girls to eat, but now we all share a passion for cooking.  What was once a love for cooking that I had as a young man, is now something we share as a family.  Life is good (and tasty).

My first real love was the Jersey tomato.  I fell in love with this sweet and juicy masterpiece of Mother Nature long before I fell in love with my wife or had my two beautiful daughters.  For those of you who have never lived in the Northeast, or had a Jersey tomato, I can only describe it as a little piece of heaven. The Jersey tomato is so remarkable (lasting only a few short months), that it has virtually ruined eating tomatoes for me, during the remaining 9 or 10 months of the year.  Up there with the white truffle, the perfect baby back rib or Angus prime steak, eating a Jersey tomato renders the Californian, Floridian and Chilean tomato eating experience to something that can only be described as digesting a wet woody red piece of cardboard.   

During the period of nuclear winter, known as the off-Jersey tomato season, other worldly tomatoes can only be experienced with long cooking periods and copious amounts of garlic, basil and olive oils to make them anything like palatable.  I confess, I am a Jersey tomato snob.  And the same can be said for Jersey corn, rendering corn eaten in the other 9 months, only suitable for cows as feed.  What makes Jersey corn and the Jersey tomato so unique, I’m told, is the combination of salt, sandy soil, hot days and warm nights that bring out the sugars in both.  For me, the end of July is like a culinary Christmas, marking the beginning of food nirvana available for the picking in my own backyard or at the neighborhood farm stand; never more than two minutes away.   New Jersey is often maligned, and in some cases, especially with our ridiculous politics, deservedly so.  But it is often overlooked for its, produce (didn’t get the nickname ‘Garden State’ for ‘nutin), its seafood and incredible neighborhood food.  Eating is good on the Garden’s plate.

Boy vs. Girls; One of the great mysteries of this great life we lead, especially to the keen (tongue in cheek) observer like me, is the remarkable differences between boys and girls.  Beyond the obvious, I often wonder why guys are so sloth like, slovenly and generally unremarkable in their approach to creature comforts.  When I headed off to college in Max, my ’69 Beetle with green shag carpeting, a Coors tap handle for a stick shift and a killer stereo, I needed only to worry about few things to satisfy all my creature comforts.  I needed my stereo speakers (the small 24” tall pair, as opposed to my 3 foot Cerwin Vega’s that could take the roof off a dorm room); an amp; my turntable; a dozen or so albums (they were vinyl, so they took up more room than CD’s or the 2,000 songs that fit snuggly in your pocket on an iPod); 3 pairs of jeans; some t-shirts, flannel shirts; sneakers; boots; sheets, towels & a pillow; my Crockpot; a typewriter (no laptops or desktops back then) and my ski gear.  Except for the skis, all of that fit neatly into the back seat of my tiny little bug, still leaving room for at least one other person, if I so chose.  My shopping list for ‘new things’ needed for the 3 ½ hour trip to school, and for the next three months until I got home for Thanksgiving, were things like shampoo, deodorant, a new comb, several 3-packs of tightie whities from JCP, a pair of cords if I needed to dress-up (I didn’t), and a new tomato crate to hold my record albums. 

I was talking to a good friend yesterday, who is my age and has two boys the same age as my two girls.  His boys, like my daughters, are both going to be in college this year, one a senior and the other a freshman.  When I asked if they were all prepared to go off to college, he said that they were both working up on the Cape this summer, and that he expected them to come home next week, pack a suitcase and some essentials, and they would be off a few days later with, maybe two suitcases worth of stuff in toto. 

My girls on the other hand, which I have on good authority are pretty similar to most girls heading off to college are an entirely different story.  Daughter #1 (D1), is my rising senior, a communications major/sociology minor, who is moving into her own apartment with another girl; and Daughter #2 (D2), is my actress who will be a freshman BFA acting major in the fall. D1, for the past 3 weeks, has taken over the better part of our dining room and ½ of a two car garage as a staging area for her trip down to Washington.  For this pilgrimage we have rented a 14’ cargo truck, which appears likely be filled to the roof top.  Understandably, this is an apartment, and it does require the requisite, couch, kitchen/coffee tables, bed, bedroom set, desk, etc. etc. The cost of rental and fuel will likely be double the value of the contents of the truck, and I am anticipating that we will need to rent one again in the spring after she graduates.  Not a good return on investment, but it makes her and her mother happy.  There is lots of priming, painting and re-finishing going on in the back yard.  Dad, the resident sysadmin and networking expert, is busy working on computer stuff for the two girls; I just finished cutting and sanding a top to D1’s new (old) coffee table and will start building the necessary framework for a fabric wall (hate to tell you how much this is going to cost) to separate the dining room from the living room, which is being fashioned into a 2^nd bedroom of this formerly one bedroom apartment.  I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg of the ‘dad work’ that will be required in the coming weeks before we shove off to Washington DC. 

D2, has commanded the living room as her staging area.  It blows my mind how much attention to detail one’s (remember this is a girl) first dorm room requires.  Duvets, and duvet cover, matching pillow sham, dust ruffles, bed risers, fabric covered bulletin board that coordinates perfectly with the aforementioned bed décor; desk accessories; pots, pans, plates & other kitchen stuff (note, the dorm does not have a kitchenette); vacuum cleaner; iron & ironing board; additional bulletin boards; magnetic board; posters, prints & wall hangings (plus special no-stick 3M wall hangers); TV (roommate is bringing the fridge); computer & printer; iPod & docking station/clock radio combo; pillows galore; lap-desk; clothes, clothes and more clothes.  This will easily fill 75% of our 8 passenger Honda Pilot SUV plus a roof rack carrier barely leaving room for the driver (Moi), D2 and her mother.  No doubt much more will be bought at Target when we arrive in Boston and discover what’s missing, not to mention what’s to be shipped in the following weeks. 

Then vs. Now; Permit me to reflect on what a difference technology has meant to our new college students.  I had the latest in cutting edge technology when I shipped off to school; my Crockpot, turntable, speakers, Abbey Road, Layla, Dark Side of the Moon, an alarm clock and my brand new Royal electric typewriter that I got for high school graduation plus 12 sheets of correction paper for the nights of typing and retyping from sleep deprived mistakes and my, less than ideal typing skills.  Communication needs were much simpler (and cheaper) then, I needed only a couple of dimes (in the even I lost one) for the payphone to make my requisite collect call each Sunday to tell everyone I was fine and to occasionally ask for a little money.   

Today, TV’s, DVD players, laptops, printers, printer cartridges, paper, iPods, cords, cords and more back-up cords for everything that isn’t wireless or Blue Tooth; mobile phones with QWERTY keyboards, and internet access have completely changed the technological landscape.  I asked Casey my good friend and techno mentor if I should get the girls Mac’s or PC’s; and after thinking about it for a minute, he suggested PC’s.  This bemused me as he is a total Mac OS nerd. When I asked why he would recommend the lowly (in his mind) PC, he asked me if I wanted to hear from them when they went off to school.  I replied in the affirmative.  He said that they would always be having problems with their PC’s and would be calling Dad, the sysadmin, to fix them over the phone.  I thought long and hard about what he said … and bought the PC laptops. 

NOTE regarding the difference of going to college with today’s technologies: Back when I was getting ready for college and we got our assigned roommate, we called each other to introduce ourselves over a land line (touch-tone mind you) one-time and it was ‘catch as catch can’ when we met for the first time in the fall.  Today, it is an entirely different story.  D2 received notice of her roommate and within 24 hours they were email and Facebook pen pals.  D2’s RA contacted her within 48 hours of the room assignment and half the kids assigned to her floor were already in contact with each other via Facebook comparing everything from majors and social preferences to things that were going to happen on day 1 when they arrive.  They will probably know each other better before stepping out of the car onto campus than I knew of my peers when I left after my first entire year at college.  Email, IM, texting, Facebooking, Tweeting and other messaging technology like Skype have completely changed the college experience.  Daily calls from their unlimited family text and minute plan mobile phones, thrice daily, or more, text messages back and forth, have completely eliminated the line at the payphone a the end of the dorm hall on Sunday’s.  I kind of like that; it lets you know they are alive and takes the mystery out of wondering if you will hear from them on Sunday.  The Paradigm has shifted indeed; WiFi, Bluetooth, WAP, XML over HTTP, high speed VOIP, internet and cloud computing have long since changed everything.  Long gone are the days of White-Out and correct-it paper. Today’s only caution is to not print too much in color because your $45 color ink cartridge needs to last a full semester.  Even D2’s printer is WiFi.  The cords are primarily for power and back-up when all else fails. Music, words, pictures and film are all digital.  D2 is still taking Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon and Eric Clapton’s Layla, along with 2000 more songs neatly packed in 4 ounces of hardware plus earbuds.  While, the old soul that she is, has a turntable and all of my favorite records, there will be no more vinyl at college, or falling asleep with the needle of the record player clicking back and forth over and over on Stairway to Heaven, until you wake up. 

I have to admit; I love the new technology and vastly prefer the iPods and Pandora to my cherished vinyl.  Staying in touch and hearing that my girls are ‘alive’ on a daily basis will be a great comfort when their mother and I face our first season of ‘empty nesting’.  And if this year is anything like D1’s first year at college, we will hear from them regularly.  That may be another astonishing difference between boys and girls.  According my friends with college boys, they do have the same technology to communicate with home but they don’t use it like girls do and that, for this father of two daughters, is a good thing.  Yes we are pushing our daughters out of the nest in a few weeks, albeit more like driving them out of the nest with truck loads of accessories and appropriate décor, but we know we are never more than a click away from touching them and knowing their okay.

1.)        Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable. - Voltaire

Waiting for the fat envelopes to come is a form of madness.  Fat envelopes – with words like ‘On behalf of our entire faculty and staff, I am pleased to inform you…’, ‘Congratulations’ and ‘take time to ‘Celebrate’, as opposed to the little skinny window envelopes – with words like ‘we’re sorry to have to tell you this’, ‘not everyone’, and ‘we’ve had more applications this year than there are words in Webster’s Dictionary’… you get the picture.   This is the year that daughter #2 (D#2) graduates from high school and heads off to college.  Oh happy day, save for the minor inconvenience of tuition costs (more about that later), Mom and Dad have finally reached that well-deserved and coveted stage of life; empty nesters!   

But wait, there is this little thing called the college application process (CAP).  The CAP began 18 months ago with the beginning of the happy college visits.  School after school, town after town, all pre-vetted for academic excellence.  Unfortunately at the beginning of this process, those of you who have college aged children realize that more hinges on the quality of the tour guide, the schools colors and what the name looks like on a sweatshirt than much of anything else. 

The CAP then migrates into worrying about the junior/senior year class load; whether or not you have enough AP or honors courses; and of the dreaded SAT exams.  The angst of the latter can be smoothed out a little by taking the SAT prep course.  The stress of the former however, is designed specifically to punish D#2’s father and give him gray hairs.   

The next phase, having selected the schools that pass all the strictest criteria such as town, sweatshirt, food, dorms, tour guides, what the other students look like walking around campus, and occasionally, to indulge her father, the institutional academics; is to submit the college application.  That is an amazingly complex process in and of itself.  But wait; there is the essay, the recommendation letters, and the decision of whether or not to apply early decision.  ED NOTE: For those of you who have not yet gloried in the CAP process, I highly recommend pushing your child, with all the credibility that you have left with your rising college student, to accept the early decision process.  Our dear D#1 did this, was accepted by her 1^st choice back in that December a few years ago; the rest of the applications were withdrawn and everyone had a college sweatshirt, auto window sticker and I, my logoed golf cap, under the tree by Christmas. 

2.)        Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence. - Edgar Allan Poe

 Poe’s definition of madness came to mind after spending more than we had originally planned to spend on college, on college prep schools pushing, year after year, to make the grades that would be good enough to get D#2 into med school.  And then, she has an epiphany and decides, instead, to become an ‘actress’!  Since our daughters were old enough to speak, her mother and I have told them that they could be anything they wanted to when they grew up; to follow their passions and to never look back.  With D#2, the plan was right on track, and up until maybe five years ago, she was almost assuredly going to be a scientist or doctor.  I was already planning my early retirement because she could then take care of Mom and Dad in their old age.  Despite her mother and father’s limited intelligence, D#2 is really a brilliant kid.  But D#2 had a religious conversion three years ago, when she got a semi-lead in a high school musical, almost by accident, after the original actor had to drop out.  And the rest as they say is history.  In the past three years, D#2 has been in probably a dozen productions and, in many of them had the lead.  She is so in love with the theater that she has written and is directing a play that is being staged at the end of this month; and I have to admit, D #2 is really a good actor.  She’s passionate, dedicated and curious about the craft. 

Back to the application process; when, at a recent audition for college (yes, I said audition – it isn’t enough to have the grades, the boards, the essays and recommendations to get into a BFA Acting program; as an ‘actor’ you also have to audition in order to earn your fat envelope) a father asked “how will you help our children get placed after college?”  The admissions director for this prominent northeastern university thought for a moment, crossed his arms and replied, “I am not sure you understand sir, (long pause) this may be the only college major where we train your child to be professionally unemployed” in other words, preparing your student to be a waitress at Denny’s.  I think that is the kind of madness that Poe was referring to.   

3.)        Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. - Freidrich Nietzsche

I am pretty sure college is not worth the money that they charge now days.  But I am absolutely certain that we, as a society, would probably not have allowed the cost of tuition to rise as it has, if it were not for peer pressure and cultural expectations.   

4.)        The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means. - Napoleon Bonaparte

There is nothing that prepared D#2’s mom and I, for the cost of college. When my girls were born, our insurance man said, if your child was to go to an Ivy school, it will cost X; and state schools would be ½ X, or less.  Certain that it would be unlikely that a child of mine would actually grace the ivy covered halls of the ‘league’ we saved ½ X.  But unfortunately, we spent more than that on prep school.  What’s wrong with this picture?  Today, most state colleges actually cost more than our financial genius advisor projected the Ivy League schools to be.  College tuition costs have actually out performed inflation for the past 20 years by a ratio of 2:1. This is surely the madness that Napoleon was speaking of. 

We live vicariously through our beautiful children in hopes to give them a little edge over what we had when we were their age, so we press on.  After all, what are parents for?

 5.)        There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.  - Aristotle

Oh, and here is the madness of the fine print for BFA actors.  One would think (I know I was a little guilty) that a ‘mere’ acting major would be a step or two above ‘basket weaving’ for the admissions process; that you only need to be able to spell your name to get into an acting program…not so fast, no, no, no.  Get this; the likes of the top private universities in the northeast accept about 30-35% of their applicants; state schools 45-60% acceptance rates; and Princeton, just down the road, along with the rest of the Ivy’s accept about 10% of their applicants.  Are you ready?  The good BFA acting programs at the same universities admit only 2% of their applicants...talk about stress at our house…argh!!!  She could have more easily gotten into medical school.  

6.)        No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. - Aristotle

So because these acting programs audition all their applicants in venues all around the good old USA, the schools don’t send out their letters until the end of March, beginning of April.  The period between auditions in January and delivery of the letters in April, seems to age student and parent 10 years.   But alas, the letters have come; some fat…some skinny.  D#2 is thrilled with her choice and the ‘acceptance’ has been made.  My daughter and her mother are happy.  I’m happy (and broke).   

And all is right with the world!

It’s March 2, 2009 and it’s a snow day.  I couldn’t make it up to North Jersey this morning for a 9:30 meeting so I shoveled the driveway (3 times) and settled for a productive phone call instead.  I love snow days. I love shoveling the drive, it’s so therapeutic.  Snow makes me reminisce about growing up back in Colorado. 

Not sure if it was the 60’s or living in Colorado, or both, but to get a snow day off from school when I was a kid, the drifts had to be higher than the door handle of a car (and that is not too tall of a tale).  I remember crashing through snow drifts on the way to high school in my ’69 VW Beetle, so much so that you had to build up a head of steam to plow through the drifts or you could get high-centered.  I loved those days and I still thrill at the thought of driving in the snow.  Living out here, I’m not wild about the other drivers as they are a bunch of Jersey lightweights that surely couldn’t have grown up in the mountains where, like myself, they had to walk up hill for miles (in the snow and probably barefoot) to get to school; and of course uphill all the way home too.  Although in the interest of full disclosure, today, I think Colorado kids get off of school with almost as much ease as they do here in New Jersey.  

I remember when I first moved east to the Philadelphia area, I was in shock because they closed schools on a snow forecast!  Today they do that all the time.  In fact, my daughter is home today for a well deserved day off after weeks of late night rehearsals and performances in her final winter musical before shoving of to college.  And yes, they closed the school on a weather forecast; we got an automated call on Sunday announcing that school would be closed, before the first flake fell.

Back to Snow Days.  My favorite snow day(s) and I am certain my folks did not share the same sentiment, was one May back in Colorado Springs (probably the late 60’s) when the snow was so heavy, it broke power lines and we lost electricity and heat for 5 days.  There was no school of course, and I remember cooking hot dogs on skewers in the fire place.  Nothing has been that much fun since. 

Today, I am trying to catch up on all the things that I have fallen behind on, and trying not to get caught up in watching the train wreck in the stock market as the Dow crashed below the 7,000 point level today.  Why do we feel the need to look at car accidents, train wrecks and obsessively watch the Dow when it tumbles like it is doing today?  The talking heads on TV offer very little encouragement; in fact they prefer the ‘pouring gasoline on the flame’ concept of information delivery.  Even Obama’s most ardent supporters are now wondering if he can help us as we sink below the waves.

Well I digress, we were talking about snow, and I think I will go outside and play with my dogs, shovel the last quarter inch of snow and remember cooking hot dogs in the living room fireplace.  Snow always takes me home.