John Thorne

When I dropped out of college in 1961, I ended up in a tenement apartment on the Lower East Side, with the bathtub next to the kitchen sink. But this was still a time when cooking seemed relatively obvious, and when it wasn't, you looked at the directions on the package. My problems came about when I bought food that was not part of the family repertoire, chicken gizzards, for example. I had no idea what to expect from them, so I had no idea as to whether I had cooked them properly. It reminds me of the time my mother encountered an avocado but confused it with an artichoke. Close, in a way, no? Still, the results were not a success. I ate a lot of scrambled eggs at first, then branched out to cooking hamburger and chopped onion, then stirring in frozen peas. And on and on. Anyone for more kasha and chicken gizzards?
-John Thorne