After moving out of Mom’s house when I was fourteen and moving in with Dad, I missed my old home and Mom’s cooking.
Dad, a bachelor, was in the military. He’d just returned from an assignment in Germany. Besides his military day job, he had a second job running the small base’s all-ranks club, so I rarely saw him. That lasted three months. Then he retired and we moved to southern WV.
I’d mentioned missing Mom’s cooking to her on one of our phone conversations. Mom bought me Betty Crocker Cook Book as a present so I could make the stuff she had.
It was a humbling lesson. Mom usually used a recipe in her head. I had to plod their detailed instructions. Whereas her measuring skills were fast and effortlessly, I labored through cups, tsp, tbs, and their incremental differences.
But I weathered it, making myself stuffed green peppers, meat loaf, pot roast, spaghetti and meatballs, along with side dishes, and eventually baked cakes, cookies, pies, and other desserts. I never made fried chicken, odd in retrospect. I preferred roasting or grilling my chicken. In fact, my favorite meal became over-roasted thighs with buttered red potatoes and broccoli.
Don’t know why I never made the fried chicken. Maybe I was lazy, or maybe, subconsciously, I knew that some things couldn’t be duplicated.
Michael Seidel, writer 
It’s good that you learned to cook. My son is a great cook.
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I think saying that I learned to cook is a reach, but thank you. I’d say I learned how to ease my struggles with a cook book and managed some simple recipes. My wife tells others that I’m very inventive in the kitchen, but it’s because I follow my whims.
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A true chef at heart!
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Did you teach your son to cook? How did that come about?
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He helped me in the kitchen a lot, and we’d chat while cooking. He also had a job one summer as a cook at a fancy golf clubhouse.
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