The Difference Between Eating and Dining

My mother began teaching me to cook when I was tall enough to see over the stovetop. Not gourmet dishes, but eggs any way you want them, even omelets, with bacon, sausage or ham. How about some homemade hash browns and biscuits with honey-butter? Yep, can do! My father, following Italian family tradition, taught me how to prepare basic Italian dishes and proper garlic bread to go with them. I may never have my on show on The Food Channel (though I do love yelling “Bang” when adding spices), but I can put together some pretty good eats.

When Sam and Marina began to show an interest, I gleefully passed along my culinary knowledge to the next generation. Both became dab hands at breakfasts, quickly expanding their repertoire into the French toast and pancake areas (though, in both cases, their omelets come out, well, unfortunate-looking). Sam has become a coffee maven, an art in it’s own self, while Marina can put together pasta dinners that, I believe, make my father look down from Heaven and smile.

Then, a while back, Eden, my little one, started asking to learn to cook. I can offered her chances to make Pasta Roni side dishes for dinner or to help with the general preparation in some respect. That was enough for a while…

Until one morning, while the rest of us were asleep, she decided to surprise us with a pancake breakfast! Hey, she had watched her sisters do it a hundred times! Just some pancake mix and some water and some oil! And some chocolate chips and some peanut butter and, hey, how about some jellybeans? Bet Dad and sisters never had jellybean pancakes!

And coffee for Dad! Hey, he likes two cups of coffee in the morning so I guess two cups of water in the coffee maker will do, and two cups-full of fresh ground coffee in the hopper and that’s ready to go!

My Lord, she was a cookin’ genius that morning…

We awoke to the sound of her singing her Cooking-Breakfast song, which she made up to go along with the beat and pitch of the smoke detectors.

Since she did not yet understand recipe-speak, a tsp. and a tbsp. were treated as the same and I later suspected that there had been some confusion about the proper place for cooking oil in the scheme of things because her major complaint was that the jellybeans kept sticking to the bottom of the pan and the burner was on “High” so as to have breakfast ready before we awoke.

In counterpoint to the oily smoke emendating from the stove, she provided a holiday atmosphere to the occasion by leaving a blanket of white pancake mix on every flat surface, inside all the burners, and on both of the cats.

I cannot, to this day, even discuss my “coffee”… syrup.

Time heals all wounds, I’ve learned. The kitchen walls and ceiling finally lost the soot. The stove finally gave up its spot-welded areas of baked jellybeans and fried pancake mix. The cats finally came out from under the couch. My coffee maker… it was never the same afterward. The event has found a place in the Varrone Family Archives. I know this because I burnt some toast last week and Eden’s only remark, with that Eden grin, was,“Well, at least you left out the jellybeans, Dad!”