MY GLOBAL KITCHEN

Other than our weekly excursions to El Chicos for some good ol' Tex Mex, and the occasional plate of Americanized spaghetti and meatballs, I grew up totally oblivious to the cuisines of other countries.  The first time I tasted Chinese food was when my best friend's parents, who had emigrated from there, fixed a big feast for us in honor of her graduation.  My first taste of Japanese was in college, when a roomie fixed sukiyaki for me.  So, as you can imagine, living overseas, amongst people from all over the world, was quite the eye-opener for me.

Is it just me, or did Dear Hubby look a lot like Ryan Gosling back in those days?

As for my hubby, he grew up with a meat and potatoes man for a father.  George liked his meals to be predictable, so pretty much every week it would be meatloaf and mashed potatoes one night, steak and baked potatoes another, hamburgers on Saturday, roast beef on Sunday...you know the drill.  I just couldn't cook like that.  I would have gone insane from the monotony in just a few months.

I know, I've posted this before, but it's the only one I've got of me cooking!

If I was going to cook, I was going to be adventurous -- try new things, take a few risks.  Some of my experiments turned out great.  Some?  Not so much.  Trouble was, I had trouble remembering which recipes were which.  That could be why John swears we never had the same thing twice.  I always accuse him of exaggerating, but after flipping through a few of these date books of mine, I have to admit, there may be some basis to his claims.  We were eating everything from Bedoin Sandwiches and Indonesian Smoor to Veal Inverness and Gaelic Steak Flambe'!  Very rarely did he get an ordinary meat and potatoes meal -- and this was all before I discovered my special treasures at the Family Bookstore.

BD, Paula and Nellie were always willing guinea pigs for my culinary experiments.

One weekend when we were at the bookstore, just browsing around, I finally ventured away from the fiction shelves and discovered a whole section of "cookery books."  The only cookbook I owned at that point was one of those huge, dictionary-like tomes with lots of words but no pictures other than the occasional diagram for dismembering a chicken or such.  Imagine my delight upon finding a British collection of international cookbooks, where every single recipe had a beautiful, full-page color photograph to go with it!  Of course, being British, the measurements were all metric, and the recipes called for veggies I'd never heard of, like aubergines and courgettes, but did I let that deter me?  Heck no!  That first day, I bought only one volume -- the one on Middle Eastern cookery -- but by the time we left Bahrain, I had pretty much the whole collection.  Poor John.  From that point on, about the only time he got meat loaf was on his birthday!