Fix-It and Forget-It

We all know that the food we eat in childhood creates a deep sensory memory. Just a scent, a glimpse, or a taste transports us back to the long-ago kitchen where we tasted that food. We often prefer our childhood flavors to the newer recipes we’ve found.

Recently, we read an article that made us laugh: a chef flies his Italian mother to his New York restaurant several times a year to make tortellini by hand. He so desperately wanted to share the authentic flavor of his childhood with his restaurant patrons. We want to go to New York to eat Mama’s hand-rolled pasta, too!

Isn’t it interesting, the intersection between homecooking and professional restaurant cooking? We enjoy the entertainment and variety of fancy restaurant food, but we want homecooking for our souls.

Here at Fix-It and Forget-It, we support the home cooks who are creating memories for the children in their lives. You might be using your time-tested childhood recipes or experimenting with new ones, but the children will remember your cooking with love and longing.
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Years ago, when Merle and I published a quarterly magazine, we invited a guy we knew to write an article titled, “Should I Travel When the World Is Starving?”

He was thoughtful and a good writer—and he ran a travel business. But we knew he’d hit the topic head-on. We figured it would interest our readers, but we wanted to know personally what he would say. I get tormented by these kinds of things. When you’re paying attention to all the trouble in the world, you gotta wonder if it’s okay to enjoy small pleasures.
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