Grandma Rosie had a saying: “Never cheat your stomach.” My father still quotes her regularly. He especially enjoys reminiscing about the meals that had him racing home from school every day at lunchtime. My dad didn’t get a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. There was no breakfast cereal in my grandmother’s kitchen. Here, instead, are a few inspired examples of my grandmother’s own creative cooking style.

The spinach-potato knish my dad ate last weekend got him started reminiscing about Grandma’s “spinach and potatoes.”  She mashed lightly cooked greens into her potatoes, and my mother reports that Grandma made sure to include the cooking liquid for extra flavor. She never made “plain” mashed potatoes. My dad rolls his eyes as he describes this.

Sometimes Grandma poached eggs in a chunky tomato sauce that she made herself. When the eggs were just cooked, she would spoon the mixture into a length of baguette from which she had removed most of the soft white center so that only the crust remained. My dad chuckles and then wipes his mouth as he describes this.

Then there was kutschi-mutschi. That phrase alone is guaranteed to get both of my parents laughing. Kutschi-mutschi consisted of a large bowl of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, spinach, peppers, and hard-boiled eggs. There is a short disagreement about whether the eggs were hard-boiled, and dad wins. There was a mayonnaise-based dressing that Grandma mixed in thoroughly. That’s it?, that’s all?, I ask over and over again. Based solely on the look on my father’s face as he describes this dish, I am sure that there must have been something else in there (love?), but as many times as I’ve asked, these are the only ingredients he recounts.

Grandma Rosie wasn’t a vegetarian. I think she just was saving the meat for the dinner meal. (And there was plenty of it, because her father-in-law was a butcher.) I don’t know where she found these recipes, or if she just made them up herself. While her friends were serving their children matzoh ball soup, gefilte fish, or bagels and cream cheese, Grandma had another thing going entirely.

In the year before my parents married, my mother visited her mother-in-law’s kitchen weekly for cooking lessons. In this way many of the recipes were preserved and passed along. Of course, my dad likes his versions better.