My Grandma Rosie of blessed memory had a saying: “Never cheat your stomach.” Until the day he died, my father still quoted her regularly. He especially enjoyed reminiscing about the meals that had him racing home from school every day at lunchtime. My dad didn’t eat a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, and 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.

A random spinach-potato knish my dad ate one weekend immediately got him started reminiscing about Grandma’s “spinach and potatoes.”  She always mashed lightly cooked greens into her potatoes, and my mother once reported that Grandma made sure to include the cooking liquid for extra flavor. That’s the thing about stories — you can hear one fifty times, but then, on the fifty-first telling, a little tidbit like this one gets rolled into it. That’s why I try never to stop anyone from telling me a story I’ve heard before. I just know that one of these days some new golden nugget is going to be included in the story that makes it all worthwhile. Anyway, Grandma Rosie never made “plain” mashed potatoes. My dad’s eyes would roll as he described the deliciousness of this memory.

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 would chuckle and wipe the corners of his mouth as he described this.

Then there was kutschi-mutschi. That phrase alone was enough to guarantee that my father would swoon at the memory. Then both of my parents would immediately start cracking up. As far as I can tell, kutschi-mutschi consisted of a large bowl of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, spinach, peppers, and hard-boiled eggs. There would usually be a short disagreement between my parents about whether the eggs were hard-boiled, and dad would win. There was some kind of mayonnaise-based dressing that Grandma mixed in thoroughly. That’s it?, that’s all? I asked over and over again, on many different occasions. Based solely on the look on my father’s face as he described this dish, I am absolutely certain that there must have been something else in there, but as many times as I asked, these are the only ingredients he ever recounted. Now I’m wondering if the extra ingredient might just have been love. So much about kutschi-mutschi remains a mystery to me.

Grandma Rosie wasn’t a vegetarian. I think she was just saving 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 absolutely another thing going entirely.

In the year before my parents married, my mother enjoyed weekly visits to her mother-in-law’s apartment for cooking lessons. In this way many of my grandmother’s recipes were preserved and passed along. Of course, my dad, Chef Ira, a talented cook in his own right, liked his own versions better.