After helping friends with parties and wedding receptions, I found myself baking birthday and wedding cakes and putting together picnic lunches and family reunion dinners for several people I knew. When it became obvious that most of those occasions took place during weekends and holidays and deprived me of devoting time to my own family for those special times, I decided to give it up. Along with the decline in new cooking adventures, there came a decline in ideas for the newspaper column and it gradually morphed into more of a humor and opinion column.

Brian Fleck, my then editor, told me that readers liked my column and that it sold papers, so I was free to write about anything I wanted to. Since the column was shifting from food as a subject to ideas, we renamed it Food For Thought, which is a much overused phrase that has become so common that it is considered public domain and can’t be copyrighted.

I don’t know whence came the idea that columnists must have their pictures published along with their thoughts, but over the years, I suffered through various fads consisting of drawings and photos, none of which were particularly flattering or revealing of the real me, so what you see here is the final version – at 90, I must surely have the right to declare myself ageless.

As I look back at the various stages of life in the kitchen, I realize I lost, somewhere along the way, the fun and satisfaction of learning about new foods and new ways of preparing old familiar ones. Cooking with my mother had been both relaxed and adventuresome. Measuring was inexact and methods often old-fashioned (as she had learned from her mother.) Eggs were separated by dumping them back and forth between the two halves of their shells, and the egg whites for angel food cake were counted, not measured. I still smile to myself when I remember my dad watching me separate eggs for a cake one afternoon. He watched as I worked my way carefully through the required thirteen eggs and finally commented, “You’d get that done a lot quicker if you didn’t play with each egg when you break it.” Mother and I shared amused glances but didn’t explain. Dad was skilled at many things, but baking wasn’t one of them.

Once I was exposed to cooks besides those in our family, I began to alter the meat-and-potatoes meals I grew up with. I learned to use the broiler in the oven, and that not all steaks need pounding and coating with flour to be edible. It was a major break-through to learn that liver could be served pink, juicy and tender instead of sliced thin and over-cooked until hard, pasty and bitter, and that there is no such thing as cooking it with too much bacon and onions. I learned how to make fluffy matzo balls with chicken soup, and that thick, golden homemade noodles cooked in rich chicken broth are delicious over mashed potatoes. I learned a whole lot about cheeses, that there are other Mexican foods besides chili, and that not all Italian dishes involve tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. Two of my more adventurous aunts introduced me to various appetizers, salads and desserts I would never have learned about at home, and even some institutional cooking, such as at my college dorm, added new insights into the world of things to eat. I admit to being 22 years old when I first tasted lobster.

Don’t think that my palate became so sophisticated that I abandoned all the simple recipes I grew up with. Nothing can taste or smell better than my mother’s tender, fallingapart pot roast with carrots, onions, garlic and little new potatoes, served with plenty of rich, brown gravy. Her unbeatable potato salad was loaded with extra eggs, sweet pickle relish, real mayonnaise and moistened with sweet, heavy cream. I’ve never been able to surpass the macaroni and cheese which, my dad claimed was the reason he married her. She buried the macaroni in a buttery cream sauce into which she melted freshly shredded American cheese that came in two-pound blocks packed in wooden boxes. Makes me wish I could still spend the necessary time and effort to make it myself.