GIVING IT THE OLD COLLEGE TRY!

At one time in my life I did a lot of cooking. I enjoyed trying new recipes. I loved getting new pots or kitchen gadgets. I had more recipes than I knew what to do with, and still I cut more out of newspapers. I have even been known to surreptitiously tear a page out of a magazine at the doctor's office if a recipe looked good.

But time passes, and I have gotten to the point where I just take the easy way out of cooking. Several reasons have led to this. First is that the apartments we have lived in since I retired have had totally inadequate kitchens. The first apartment had no cupboard space in the kitchen and I had to tromp through the house to get my frying pan out of the balcony storage cabinet. This second apartment that we are in now has plenty of cabinet space but a miniscule refrigerator, even tinier stove and no counter space.

But secondly is that whatever happened to my sensory taste buds, which made almost all food taste awful, knocked out my desire to cook anything. I have resorted mostly to using pre-packaged, pre-made, frozen or very straightforward dinners for Jerry; I usually just take a few bites of whatever I think I can get down. I will fix Jerry a small steak, a baked potato, a vegetable and a dish of canned pears; I'll just have a couple of bites of the vegetable. I feel sorry for poor Jer, but that's just the way it goes, sadly to say.

However, lately I have been trying to force my taste buds to ease off the nastiness. I'm forcing myself to eat things that really don't taste good but that I can manage to swallow. I have a big problem with anything sweet, but today I'm going to tackle making blackberry cobbler. It is a good time of the year for a cobbler; the frozen berries do well in cooked dishes, so I'm going to use frozen blackberries and a package of buttermilk biscuit mix. In my younger days I was such a purist in my cooking that I would have gone out to pick the blackberries myself (well, I would have wanted to, but since we don't have blackberries around urban Southern California I would have purchased a box of them at the market) and bought some self-rising flour and some buttermilk (ugh, never even in my best days did I develop a taste for straight buttermilk) and made that cobbler the old fashioned way.

But today, since it will be a toss-up if I can eat it or not, I'm going to take the easy way out. Jerry is a great eater of anything sweet, so he'll like whatever I fix. And just maybe I can convince my taste buds that this is a perfectly acceptable taste. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.