Recipes Passed on From Members’ Moms, Great-Grandmoms and Others

cuss the dishes they submitted and to find out how their cooking and tastes may have changed (or not) over the last 25 years.

A Way to Remember Mom

Laura Richlin has been a Co-op member since she and her boyfriend (now husband) moved to Germantown in 1991. At the time she contributed to the cookbook, she was pregnant with her daughter, the younger of her two children.

“This was part of my mourning process of losing my mother,” she said. “She was my cooking inspiration. Being part of this project was a way of memorializing her and sharing her recipes with everybody.”

Laura’s mother died in 1995. Her “Sumptuous Strawberry Soup”, a chilled summer soup with fresh strawberries, orange juice and club soda, is the first recipe in the cookbook. In Laura’s notes from the original submission, she wrote:

Growing up in New Jersey, we always went strawberry picking. We’d spend what seemed like hours in the field with my mother, picking and eating. After a few days of gorging on strawberries, making strawberry jam, and other things, we were sick of strawberries. That’s when Mom would make this soup. And I never got tired of it.

Laura submitted three additional recipes. “Phyllis’ Favorite Vinaigrette” is her mother’s recipe for a simple but elegant salad dressing. She still makes it for others, but “the irony is that I just don’t use salad dressing anymore,” because she’s more concerned about the additional calories.

In preparation for our conversation, I made another of her submissions, Mexicali Bean Salad, which features chickpeas and string beans. The idea for it originat makes about 40 cookies,” she said. I made a half batch, and it was enough for a dozen people!

Sadly, the cookies will not be baked in Laura’s house anymore because she no longer eats gluten. But the cookie monster in me promised to pick up the slack; I plan to make it one of my go-tos. I don’t pretend to be a prodigious cook, but I can follow good instructions.

“My mother said, ‘If you can read, you can cook,’” she said. “And she was right.”

Cooking for kids changed Laura’s need for precision. “I realized that now, 25 years later, I’m much more of an intuitive cook,” she said. But she is “fussier about ingredients.” Fortunately, the Co-op is still around to

MEXICALI BEAN SALAD (from the Weavers Way Cookbook: A Culinary Tapestry)

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cups cooked chickpeas or kidney beans (canned are ok)

• 1 ½ cups lightly steamed string beans, cut in one-inch pieces

• 1 large clove garlic, minced

• 3 Tbs. olive oil

3 Tbs. lime or lemon juice