I decided I would cook artichokes and serve them with melted butter. The idea was to pull off a leaf after the choke had been boiled until tender and dip it into the butter. Then you scraped the soft bottom of the leaf off with your teeth. There wasn't a lot on the leaf. And it took a while to scrape all those leaves. When you finished there was a pile of scraped leaves. Then when you got to the bottom or heart, you scraped off the fluffy choke and then cut up the soft bottom and ate it. Poor Dad. He was a trooper and ate the whole thing. But that was going to be his last choke for sure. Dad wondered how anyone ever pointed at an artichoke plant and said, "You know, I think I will eat that." How desperate for food did they have to be?

After I bought my house, I experimented with friends, Sally and Madonna, every Wednesday night. They would critique the main dish, side, and dessert and determine if I should keep the recipe. The cantaloupe ice cream was a no. The clam linguine was a yes. Every Thursday, Mom made her brothy potato soup and we watched the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Mash. I usually brought a bundt cake. So after the shows, we would have cake and coffee. Dad loved sweets and particularly cakes. It was left with him to enjoy with his coffee later.

Mom had certain dishes she loved and asked me to make for her. She loved my beef stroganoff, dirty rice, and fried veggies. She also liked my liver and onions. I also cooked Cornish hens with broccoli rice stuffing. Did you know that there is no such thing as a "Cornish" hen. It was made up to keep from saying "pullet", basically a teenaged chicken.

When I began dating Roger, he lived in Springfield, Illinois and I lived with Mom and Dad in St. Louis. I would visit him on a weekend when he didn't have the girls and he would come to St. Louis on alternating free weekends. One of Mom's most memorable meals was fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and milk gravy, what Dad called "cowboy gravy." I made a zucchini casserole. We were eating the chicken, kind of. The crust was delicious. Mom liked to bone her chickens and remove most of the skin. She would freeze the remains for soup stock. Dad finally spoke up, mystified, "Mary, sweetheart, I'm having a hard time finding any meat." Mom had floured the remains of the boned chicken and fried it. We never let her live that down.

Roger did compliment the zucchini dish. He said, "You know, I've never eaten cooked cucumbers before. They're pretty good." He didn't know what zucchini was. I took him out to the garden and showed him.

I was always impressed with how Roger had eaten what there was on the bone scraps and never complained or said a word. I will say this about Roger, he always ate what was put in front of him without complaint or comment, unless he really loved it. He did complain about beans. He hates beans. "Won't eat a bean." He is a meat and potatoes man. He loved the fried wild turkey, fried deer meat, fried rabbit in brown gravy. He loved the pot roasts, pork tenderloins, and smothered cube steaks. He was not much on pasta or casseroles.

And I made a point of naming the recipe after them. And I shared many I had made. There were a few recipes I had to hunt down from restaurants. Paulette's Kahlua Ice Cream Pie, The Brush Mark's African Peanut Soup, St. Louis Art Museum's Cafe's Wild Rice Soup, which I had every day for lunch. Yacovelli's Side Door Lounge's Beef Ravioli Soup. I wish I had gotten The Farmer's Lemon Mousse before it closed. Rich and Charlie's Toasted Ravioli and Italian Salad is everywhere on the internet and is over 50 years old. It's so famous that it has become standard fare at other Italian restaurants.