merie kirby

Mark Bittman recently suggested in his New York Times blog that the government “encourage and subsidize home cooking ... [because] when people cook their own food, they make better choices.” I wholeheartedly agree that we make better choices when we cook our own food.

Because I love to cook, I tend to cook most of my family's meals. Still, over the past couple of years I found that it was getting easier to either go out or pick something up instead. So, last fall I renewed my commitment to home-cooking; call it a New School Year’s Resolution. We would eat out just once or twice a month, and the rest of the time we would eat our own home-cooked meals.

One of my favorite rules to live by comes from Michael Pollan: Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Pollan’s advice is especially apt for me when I think about my own great-grandmother. Hilda Liljequist was born to immigrant Swedish parents in Boston in 1889. She attended the Boston Cooking School as a teenager, and took her first job as chef at a hotel in New Orleans. A few years later she made her way, by ship through the Panama Canal and by train, to a new job in Oakland, California, where she met and married my great-grandfather, a Scotch-Irish blacksmith from a Michigan farm who had actually run away and joined the circus as a youth. Later they moved to Los Angeles, when it was still possible to drive around the back roads of Hollywood, stopping to gather wild elderberries and pick oranges from a roadside grove.