First Thing I Learned to Cook/ by Stephanie Peterson, Lola Server
My sisters and I were raised by a single mom who worked full time. She got home after 7 pm and was often too tired to cook. So my grandmother would come to our house in Long Island from Queens and stay for a few days at a time and cook up a storm. She made eggplant parmigiana, potato croquettes, baked ziti, and even pancakes. She would freeze a lot of it so we could eat it after she went home. She always tried to teach us to cook, but we were bratty teenagers and didn’t want to learn. Finally, she made us learn something super easy. She called it Mexican bean spread. So you take a can of kidney beans and put them in a mixing bowl. Then you add 3 tablespoons of ketchup and a few dashes of cayenne pepper. You mash the beans up as hard as you can with a fork, then you break out the egg beaters and mix them on high until they are kind of smooth. Then you spoon some of this onto a piece of sliced bread, top it with 2 slices of American cheese and sliced tomatoes. Then you broil it in the oven for about 3 minutes. The cheese melts and the bread gets nice and toasty, and it’s pretty good. “It’s a meal!” grandma insisted, and it was. PS. Her birthday was a few days ago, March 20, and she is 90 years old.
(Editor’s note: this is the first entry in our new staff blog contest “The First Thing I Learned to Cook.”)
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