Working at Rice as a staff person doesn’t always provide a connection with students.  Depending on your job, it’s possible to work well all week and never have a conversation with a Rice student.  I wanted that connection and so I became an associate at Wiess College, because it is where my dad lived when he came to  Rice as a football player in the 1950’s –Wiess was the freshman football players’ assigned residence hall back then.

The more time I spent at Wiess, the more I enjoyed connecting with students, and the more I wanted to give back to the college.  When I thought about what I had to offer Wiess, cooking seemed the most useful skill I could pass along.

Cooking is a big part of my parents’ story:  When my mom got married in the 1950’s, all she could make was fudge.  She burned many pots and pans learning how to prepare a meal for her husband.  When something worked, she repeated it. A lot.

Before preparing her husband’s first sandwich to take to work after their honeymoon, she asked what he liked and he said, “anything is fine — how about boloney (bologna).”  One year later, he asked her not to make him any more boloney sandwiches.  Ever.  She was surprised and said, “I thought you liked boloney.”  He admitted, “I did, until I ate it every day for a year” and he never ate bologna again the rest of his life.

For their first holiday together, she decided to cook a ham, but she didn’t know how.  Her husband was helpful, “My mom boils it for 4 hours.”  Her mom offered advice, “I bake mine 4 hours.”  So she boiled it 4 hours and then baked it 4 hours, twice as long as any family-style ham should be cooked.

He’d been hunting, fishing, and camping for years, and could cook over a wood fire.  When she had trouble frying chicken, he brought in a cast iron skillet that no amount of cleaning could brighten up.  She took one look at that “burnt old thing” next to her shiny wedding pots and pans and told him to get it out of the house.  A year later, when she commented to her mother-in-law that the crust always fell off her fried chicken, her mother-in-law replied, “what you need is a cast iron skillet.”  Her husband’s outdoor cast iron skillet secretly slipped back into the kitchen and never left again.  And the fried chicken turned out perfectly every Sunday after that.

Cooking is also a big part of my story: the first time I met Mark’s parents, I took a chocolate pie for dessert.  Mark’s dad pulled him aside after the meal and said, “I’d marry that girl, if I were you.”  Apparently, the pie-baking gene had skipped a generation or two, and my future father-in-law was anxious to bring it back into the family.