The First Thing I Learned to Cook/ by Sean Hartley, Operations Manager
The first time I made dinner it was one of our family favorites, creamed tuna on biscuits. I must have been ten, and making dinner was the natural progression of putting away the dishes as my first chore, then setting and clearing the table as I got older.
My parents weren’t great cooks at the time, although over the years my dad has gotten to be quite good at it. As a parent of my own eight year old (he’s unloading the dishwasher as I write this), it finally dawns on me that figuring out the age old question “what’s for dinner?” gets to be harder and harder to answer as time goes on.
No wonder my folks relied on Sunset magazine as their culinary inspiration (hello Northwest taco salad). Creamed tuna on biscuits really isn’t as gross as it sounds. Think tuna noodle casserole or biscuits and gravy.
I’m not quite sure what happened, why there was no oversight or quality control. I’m pretty sure that my first attempt at dinner didn’t look as pretty as this picture, and it tasted awful. The biscuits were great, but in the white sauce (straigh outta The Joy of Cooking ) somehow I mistook the teaspoon abbreviation for a tablespoon. It was like a fishy saltlick.
Given my current profession, my family likes to retell this story frequently.
(Editor’s note: this is the 10th and final entry in our staff contest: “The First Thing I Learned to Cook.”
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April 28th, 2010 at 11:47 am
I still remember my friends calling me to hang out after dinner. I was always an hour late to meet up with them. Why? Because I had to do the dishes. Sorry, Everett!