Home made

Ken is the best husband ever. There are many reasons for this, but truth be told, part of what puts him at the top of the list is this: he does the grocery shopping and the vast majority of the cooking. (Can I get an "amen," ladies?)

The reason he does the grocery shopping has to do with several factors involving coupons, household budgeting and long-range economic forecasting that I can't even begin to describe here. He's one of those people who actually get out the store sale inserts from Wednesday's Food section and plans what to buy for the week. There's a proprietary shopping list that gets filled out, based on type of food and section of the store. No, seriously.

And he does most of the cooking because the secondary part of his food planning is menu planning, the result of which is Sunday evenings cooking up one or two feasts for the week's dinners, thus allowing us to dine happily on leftovers for many days to come.

Beyond convenience though, he has developed a love of cooking over the past several years. It started by accident. We were both haphazard meal-makers, forever cobbling something together at the last minute, forgetting to plan ahead.

Then he started reading the Sharpe's book series; listening to the books on tape, actually. Sharpe's Army, Sharpe's Rifles, etc. British soldier during the Napoleonic and 19th century colonial wars. Anyway, the credits in one of them, for some reason, gave credit to a '50s cookbook by a British author, Elizabeth David. (Who, as it turned out, was one of the pre-eminent cookbook authors of her time, if not still. The British Julia Child, if you will.) It was called South Wind Through the Kitchen, an anthology of her best French, Italian and Mediterranean recipes.

He found it at the library and began making dishes from it. He discovered that it wasn't that difficult. The food tasted really good. He was good at it. He liked it.

One cookbook begat another. He'd check them out from the library, try a few recipes, photocopy the ones he liked. Repeat. Eventually, he assembled them all into a recipe library, housed in the slots of one of those photo albums with pockets.

Then he really ramped it up with the purchase of some serious cooking appliances: first a Kitchenaid stand mixer (thank you eBay!), then a Breadmaster 2000 bread-maker.

Meanwhile, upon moving into our first house in 2002, I discovered a love of yardwork and gardening, mostly the flowering kind. We moved two years later, to this house with an even bigger yard and greater possibilities. I tried vegetables a couple of summers, with mixed success due to a lack of a planting location with proper soil and sun.

Then Ken chopped down the woefully misplaced tree in our side yard, dug out the stump, and built two raised beds in the now-sunny strip of land. He found planters that grow tomatoes like nobody's business. And last summer we had our own little farm: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, squash, peppers, beans.

Some of it we liked better than others. I made some mistakes, I learned some things. I gave a lot of tomatoes and squash away. I found recipes to use fresh vegetables: salsa and Turkish ezme salad for the tomatoes; fritatta of squash, fried squash, baked squash; and oh-so-delicious refrigerator pickles. And I canned 8 jars of dill pickles, in spears and slices.

We both learned that a lot of food is easier to make than it seems, it tastes much better, and it's way cheaper, too. We've eliminated a number of prepared foods from the shopping list over the past months: bread (we make ours in the bread-maker); whipped cream (buy whipping cream, put in stand mixer, turn on for 5 minutes); egg nog at Christmas time (the homemade kind is *so* much better); meatballs; pizza sauce.

And another? Tortillas. I made a dozen and a half yesterday (there they are in the photo above). From start to finish, it took about an hour. Cost? Pennies--whatever it costs for a couple of cups of flour, a third of a cup of shortening, plus a little salt and baking powder. And oh man, do freshly griddled tortillas taste good.

We're not the only ones who've re-discovered the pleasures of getting back to basics, of course. But we're glad to be part of the movement, or whatever it is.

Now if I could just figure out how to make my own Double Stuf Oreos ...