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[livius drusus]

Is there something you always ask for when you're eating at your parents' houses? Whether you still live there or are long gone, whether you can make it yourself just fine or not: what are some of your home favorites?

Here's my mom's ragu. It is as thick as manwich, hearty as steak and potatoes, and it blankets fresh egg fettuccine like no other. Warning: my mom uses an outlandish number of onions. I usually cut it in half depending on the onions in question.


Ragu All Mamma Livius

1 lb lean ground beef
4 lg cloves garlic
6 med onions chopped
3 T olive oil
1.5 lb peeled san marzano (Roma) tomatoes
4 oz tomato paste
2.5 tsp dried basil
2.5 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1.5 tsp red pepper flakes
2 tsp sugar
grated fresh parmesan

1 lb egg fettucine

Sautee garlic and onion in oil in a large skillet until golden. Add beef and stir until browned. (If your beef isn't extremely lean, brown it in a separate pan and drain the drippings before adding to the garlic and onion saute.) Add tomatoes and tomato paste. Add all spices and simmer slowly for at least an hour.

Cook fettucine in a tall pot full of boiling water. Do not break them, cut them or mutilate them in any way. If you don't have a tall enough pot, use a nice nook and cranny short pasta like shells or fusilli. Drain the pasta into a collander and quickly put on a platter or divide directly into bowls.

Serve the pasta and the sauce separately at the table so people can alter their sauce ratio at will, but don't linger: The faster the fettuccine and the sauce meet, the better it is. Add some grated parmesan on the table and voila.

[LadyShea]

Home cookin' is all about simple comfort foods for me. Pot roast with potatoes and carrots, homemade egg custard (this is mostly for illness or heartbreak), biscuits and gravy, banana pudding....damn now I am homesick

[pescifish]

Like as if it was my mom that cooked while I was growing up... More "like what dishes did the folks ask me to cook whenever I came home?"

answer:
mac & cheese
albondigas
rib roast
spaghetti
grilled leg of lamb (for Dad)
Bisquick rolled biscuits: my mom could make the macaroonlike-rip-the-roof-of-your-mouth drop kind, but she liked the ones I rolled out much better

[Lauri D]

My grandmother/mother's bread pudding. *sigh*

[SharonDee]

Since I'm going to my mom's this weekend, this thread has appeared just in time. I love my mom's turkey & dressing better than anyone else's, but we only get that once or twice a year.

I love her Sock-It-To-Me cake, but it's usually too much work for her to make one of those. (Baked in a bundt pan with random caches of brown sugar deposited throughout. I just love biting into one of those!)

Then there's my dad's fried catfish; I refuse to eat anyone else's. He raises them in the backyard pond, then deep-fries them up on his gas grill out in the garage. (Mom has banished him from the kitchen because of the fishy smell.)

Oh, and then there's Mom's salmon patties; her butter bean casserole; her potato salad; her coleslaw. The way she cooks up a mess of black-eyed peas, cornbread, green beans, apple or peach cobbler.

*sniff*

Gosh, I'm suddenly homesick. ALABAMA, HERE I COME! :clap:

[wildernesse]

The way my mama cuts corn to make "creamed" corn--there's no cream, but plenty of pepper. And biscuits. And cornbread (without sugar!). And fried veggies--eggplant and squash and okra.

My mom doesn't cook anymore. She never liked to, but we all had to eat. Luckily, fresh veggies from the garden in the summer didn't need too much help.

Yeah, this makes me homesick for summers at home, with me leaning my chair back on two legs and sun streaming through the kitchen windows.

[livius drusus]

Mmmm... Puddings and patties and albondigas, oh my! Y'all have inspired me to pay homage to my mom's mashed potatoes which are the platonic form of the art, imnho. Add a wee drappie of those salty, light, delicious natural juices from the turkey, and you have the best part of Thanksgiving on a plate.
:homer:

[RevDahlia]

My mother is the best cook I know, hands-down. I know that almost everyone insists that their mother is the best cook on the planet, but I swear mine really is. Not because she has many unique specialty dishes in her repertoire, but because she has flawless instincts; she never over-or-underspices anything, she always knows exactly when something is done, and so on. I don't remember her ever screwing up one dish. So I miss her cooking most when I've failed spectacularly at something that she can make in her sleep.

She is also that rarity, a terrific home cook who is also a hotshot baker. Anecdote: my husband is a gingerbread fiend, so I decided to make a gingerbread birthday cake for him. After some sleuthing, I settled on this recipe. (http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/103087) It turned out just fine -- miraculously, because I am no baker ordinarily. Totally unbeknownst to me, Mom had found the same recipe and decided to make it, also for Mr. Dahlia's birthday. We both followed the recipe to the letter, except for that she used oatmeal stout and I used Guinness, and we both added fresh ginger. Her version arrived just as we were tucking into my version. Long story short, hers was gone in two days and mine was still sitting around a week later. I don't know how she does it. (That is an excellent recipe, by the way, even for non-hotshots.)

All that said, I have managed to successfully reproduce Mom's corn chowder, which is the dish I would always insist she make when I was sick or feeling otherwise bleak. All the amounts are variable, depending on how enormous of a cauldron you want to make. This soup is excellent in that, unlike most cream soups, it does not involve a single speck of flour.

Corn Chowder

Melt a couple of tablespoons of butter in the bottom of a large stockpot. Drop heat to medium-low. Add quite a bit of chopped onion, red pepper and celery, clap on the lid, and allow veggies to become completely limp. Add stock -- chicken or vegetable, and of course homemade is ideal -- salt, pepper, dried thyme, and (secret ingredient) one tablespoon of dark brown sugar or blackstrap molasses, and bring to the boil. Add potatoes cut in 1/2" dice, and cook until they are just just tender. Add frozen or fresh corn, about the same volume as the potatoes, and cook for about another two minutes. Lower heat to medium-low. With a potato masher, churn soup furiously until a good number of the potatoes have dissolved and soup thickens. Add milk, cream, or creme fraiche. Heat through, add a scant handful of chopped parsley, and garnish with any or all of the following: chopped scallion, croutons, grated sharp Cheddar, crumbled bacon.