My Awakening To Food; The Dreaded Dutch Baby

The Backround


Home style was a word that was used sparingly in my household. For my mother and I, home style consisted of sitting at the television with a bowl of Kraft macaroni & cheese. The word itself seemed alien to me, but I’ve found that it is associated with made from scratch; meals that were made from recipes that were handed down through the years instead of packaged boxes. I’m a scavenger, a person who eats whatever is convenient, (I even remember a day that I ate nothing but cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner). My mother and I are master chefs of ramen noodles and the easy made meals that take twenty minutes or less to cook.
We are a family of scavengers; we eat things that we do not necessarily want to eat but things that are there to fill our stomachs so that we may carry on with our business in the day. In fact, the best meals I can recall are not from home but from the restaurants that we visit on occasion, we became scavengers because my mother never inherited recipes from her mother, and so on and so forth, I suppose the title scavenger is the only thing we inherited. Although, it was when I first had a home cooked meal that my taste buds would dance and sing at the pleasure of it all and my cooking abilities would be changed forever.






The Introduction to Food



When I came over to my friend, Drew’s, house one night for dinner, I was unprepared for what awaited me. His family was from Buffalo New York, a place that was full of strangely named foods, which made eating these foods all the more interesting. That night we had beef on weck, a sandwich that is made from kosher salt, toasted rolls and roast beef; the rest of America may know this as a “French dip” sandwich. While his mother was busy seasoning the rolls and warming the roast beef, Drew and I and I sat and chatted with the rest of his family, having conversations of New York and how different it was from Colorado.
When the time came to sit and eat, I felt a sense of anxiety at having to sit at a table and have a conversation while eating. It seemed so strange to me; when my family had meals we sat isolated from each other; we would never speak or look at each other when eating. I looked around me but I had nothing to say, I just quietly sat in my chair and ate the food on my plate. I looked at their smiling faces, how they made jokes and how they recounted their day, but still I had nothing to say.
After that night, I was hungry for more interaction and more conversation; what’s more I was curious as to what home cooked meals tasted like. On afternoons that I would visit and help out around the house, Drew’s grandma Barb would smash together some strawberries into a fine paste and we would have peanut butter and home made jelly. On nights that I would have dinner at the Paradiso’s house, Drew’s father would on rare, but deliciously special occasions, make his crack wings. The sauce was a secret recipe that he had concocted which gave the wings their irresistible flavor.
Soon my taste buds were trained to know the difference between store bought jelly and Grandma’s home made jelly. After a while I would unwillingly swallow the food I was given at my house in order to carry out my day, most of the time I would look forward to my visits at the Paradiso house.


Time to Prove Myself; The Dreaded Dutch Baby.


Eventually my days spent at Drew’s house would give me the courage to finally contribute something to the dinner table. The only problem was that my cooking abilities paled in comparison to the families’. After figuring out that I could not make an entire meal by myself,I decided that baking a dessert would be my best route. Another problem came to my mind what would dazzle the Paradiso’s? What would be worthy of the dinner table? It then came to mind; one of the oddest yet delicious things that I had the pleasure of sampling at my friend, Hannah’s, house; it was called a Dutch Baby. The common assumption when a person refers to this pastry is that a baby is imported from Belgium and is baked in an oven and served for everyone’s delight, this however, is not the case. A Dutch Baby is simply a large puffed up pancake filled with fruit or anything else that a person may like.
I knew it would fit perfectly into the Paradiso’s recipe book of chevetta’s, beef on wick, and cheese monkeys; it was oddly named but delicious. I gathered the ingredients needed to give birth to the dreaded Dutch Baby, measuring every spec of flour and every grain of salt.


I measured the three fourth cup of milk, beads of sweat trickling down my face as I did, all the while praying that I didn’t blow up the kitchen somehow. I mixed the three fourth cup of flour, the one pinch of salt (which by the way was frustrating to understand how accurate my pinch was), the three beaten eggs, the three fourth cup of milk, and finally the two tablespoons of melted butter. I preheated the oven to three seventy five and poured the mixture into a nine inch pie pan while carefully, I stuck it in the oven hoping that my hand would not have another scar to bare from burning myself.
All there was to do was wait. I put it on for twenty minutes, while in ten minutes I lowered the heat to three twenty five; I paced back and forth like a father waiting to hear his child cry, but the Paradiso’s called me down to the family room to watch a movie. My mind was set at ease as we laughed at “Garp”…. and then I smelled something burning. I rushed to the oven threw it open and retrieved the Dutch Baby; thankfully only a corner of it was burned, but that was not the only problem with the deformed Dutch baby. Sadly, there was no pie pan in the house for me to make the Dutch Baby in so I had to make due and use a cake pan. Most of the Dutch baby was clotted in the upper right hand corner of the pan while the corner was still sizzling from spending too much time in the oven… I had failed as a cook. The family came upstairs to partake in the baby only to find it mangled in my almost sobbing hands.
“What’s wrong?”
“It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this!”
“Who cares?” “We all screw up, I mean hell, Pam (Drew’s mother) almost burnt down our house once.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, that’s how you become a good cook is by screwing up and making mistakes.”


The Conclusion


After my mis-hap with the Dutch Baby, I started fresh with something more familiar; brownies from a box. Eventually I mastered the “recipe” on the back of the package enough to compromise it and bake the brownies twenty seven minutes instead of twenty nine. After a while, whenever I mention brownies their eyes glow in anticipation. I’ve yet to re-attempt the dreaded Dutch Baby but when I do, I will know that sometimes you have to make mistakes in order to understand how to succeed.