I was thinking the other day, “I’d like some Chop Suey like Mom used to make.  Except, you know, good.”  Jo did not shine in the kitchen.  Her recipes are not recipes anybody would greet with delight. Although in my family’s defense, my cousin Russ who used to be the food editor at the LA Times, says one of the paper’s most requested recipes was Grandma Smith’s cranberry sauce, which always boggles my mind because my memories of Grandma Smith are of her eating raw hamburger and missing part of her thumb which had come off in a basement door incident.

Where was I?  Right, food my mama used to make.

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