Rebuild from Depression Blog

She planned the cake, we made a fabulous tester cake and then spent four days on a wedding cake extravaganza: each cake had two layers of meringue, one chocolate pastry layer, and two pound cake-like layers. Between the layers were various jams and chocolate butter cream. It was frosted with regular butter cream. The main cake was three cakes standing on pillars like traditional wedding cakes. The cake was so huge and with so many layers that we actually used a drill to create holes in the lower cakes for the pillars.

"No problem" was probably an over-simplification of the task but she certainly had the chops to do it.

Creative

She is also well-skilled in making use of any food that is around. When you are left with three things in your pantry and no idea how you are going to eat dinner, she would be the one to ask. She made a salad the other day that she called "Cleaning out the refrigerator salad." It had romaine lettuce, some quinoa pasta I wanted to sample, leftover clam from an upcoming video, tomato, salad oils, garlic, and salt. It was actually pretty darned good and cleared some space in the refrigerator.

Frugal

She is a frugal gourmet. For twenty years she operated a retreat house and cooked meals for groups of 30-40 people regularly. The retreat house is actually the house we live in now, but we are not crazy enough to invite 30 people over every week to visit. All of those years she operated the kitchen on a strict budget but you would have never guessed from the flavors in the food.

One summer I played this game of asking what a plate of food cost.

"Well," she would say, "this doesn't count the electricity to run the well to water the garden, most of the seeds were heirlooms but I did spend about $30 at the beginning of the season on peppers. Besides those costs, your dinner probably costs about a dime."

That was the same summer that the Honor Society from my own high school came for their annual leadership retreat. Their advisor and long time friend of our family announced during dessert:

"This is the first time I have had a dinner at the Roses that did not include zucchini!"

"Jim, you are eating chocolate zucchini cake right now."

We laughed and laughed. Zucchini is in just about every dish around here in the summer.

Food Videos

With the focus on food on this website, my mom is a natural addition. During all of those years of cooking for large groups, people told her regularly that she needed to publish a cookbook. She was too busy cooking to write a cookbook. We're actually working on a cookbook now that centers around depression buster foods. That cookbook may be a while in coming so, in the meantime, we'll be posting food videos that will primarily feature my mom, though I may do a few myself.

The videos start this week with a basic beef salad and some wisdom on lettuce and garlic.

When she is not doing food videos, she is working on her own website that centers around scripture prayer.