Here's What's Cookin

[spatch]

According to Mom, who squirrelled this away in that photo album she made for me, I wrote this recipe when I was 5 or 6. Probably a little bit after the sympathy card/puppet show thing, as in this one I was able to make my letters nice and uniform and small.

MELTED CHEESE BALLS

1 teaspoon vanilla
3 slices cheese
1 stick of butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour

heat oven 350°
Bake so cheese melts.

Serves 4+1

I do not recommend you try this recipe at home. In fact, I'm pretty sure I never tried this recipe at home.

However, as a Lil' Chef, I was notorious for making devilled eggs with peanut butter instead of mayonnaise. I liked them so much that even when Mom made devilled eggs as part of dinner, she'd make sure to include two or three mit peanut butter just for me. You may laugh, or recoil in gastronomic fear, but I swear to you they tasted pretty good. Hell, I'd do it again right this instant if only I had some hard-boiled eggs, mustard, and peanut butter.

Comments

[ctate.livejournal.com]

My brother would only eat deviled eggs if, instead of yolk + mustard + mayo, they were filled with sweet pickle relish.

And my father swears that as a kid, he liked peanut butter & mayonnaise sandwiches.

So there.

[luckimunki.livejournal.com]

Where does the "balls" part come in?

[glowkitty]

You said "balls."

[spatch]

The recipe calls for a cup of sugar and a stick of butter, and you're wondering about the "balls"? :D

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

You forgot to note that they are VANILLA cheese balls. Mmmm!

[luckimunki.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm just ball-minded.

[spatch]

Better to have balls on your mind than on... wait, what

[acsumama.livejournal.com]

I'm going to try that just because (specifically, just because I have a cup of flour that I wouldn't otherwise use up before I head back to the US.)

[phonemonkey.livejournal.com]

I loathe mayonnaise, and the peanut butter devilled eggs sound pretty good. Sort of Indonesian style.

[spatch]

See? I was setting the fusion trend just a few years too early.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

While the cheese balls do sound like an acquired taste, the peanut butter devilled eggs sound like the secret bane of allergic kids everywhere.

That said, my devilled egg recipe contains no mayonnaise and lots of bacon, so they're right out on the kosher menu but that only means more for me.

[eeka13.livejournal.com]

HAHAHA!

My mom has a similar recipe card for "banana jelly."

1 BANANA
FORK

TAKE THE BANANA AND SMASH IT WITH THE FORK. SPREAD ON TOAST. SERVES ONE.

[sarcasma.livejournal.com]

I love the touches of verisimilitude. "Mom, how hot is the oven in your recipes?" "Mom, how much vanilla do you use in things?"

[spatch]

I'm pretty sure my recipe called for vanilla because that's what all the other recipes in Mom's cookbooks used. Well, at least, the ones in the cookie section did. That section was my favorite. I would go back and read over it religiously.

[zhym.livejournal.com]

Butter, sugar, flour -- tweak that recipe a bit, and you can have CHEESE COOKIES.

Granted, I wouldn't necessarily go with slices of cheese for that...

[mybadhairlife.livejournal.com]

Yep, if you use slices of softened Kraft Imperial Sharp Cheddar, you'd pretty much have intuited my family's cherished recipe for cheese shortbreads at age 6.

Genius will out, I suppose!

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

That's brilliant. Were you a very theoretical thinker as a child? I have to wonder if you were trying to reverse-engineer something that you had eaten, like fried cheese nuggets or cheese-flavoured corn puffs.

It would also fit in very well at the Gallery of Regrettable Food.

[spatch]

I don't know if it was reverse-engineering or an example of how I could quickly understand the gist of things, but not why it was so. I tended to do that a lot.

Quick geek example: I learned the BASIC programming language when I was 7. My first program, written after a cursory (ha ha ha) look through the programming guide without reading anything else, went like this:

10 PRINT "HELLO I AM THE AMAZING COMPUTER"
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT "NOW IT IS TIME TO DO A MAGIC TRICK"
40 INPUT A$

I didn't understand what the INPUT A$ command did at the time (it prompts the user to enter something in) but since all the beginner's programs I saw usually had an INPUT command after a PRINT command, I dutifully followed suit. Sure, I quickly figured it out after running the program, but that memory has stayed with me.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah! There are people at work who do that. I learned so many procedures from people who had learned them from someone else, who had learned them from someone else. When I started asking why certain steps were done, nobody was quite sure. It's just the way it was always done, and it's always worked. I call it cargo-cult programming. :)

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

And in retrospect, your version was smarter than what we have here, because you were able to observe the effect and realise it wasn't what you wanted. Nobody does that around here unless it's really bad. ;)