Mara came home for a few days.  She has transitioned from someone who vowed a few years ago that she would never cook into an accomplished cook with a variety of dishes.

What amazes Crummy Cook is that, unlike her dad, she doesn’t depend on recipes.  Or maybe she had made enough cousins of what we made last night – shrimp and vegetables in pasta – that she knew the ropes.

(I don’t use recipes for stir-fried dishes much; I’ve made a lot of them and know how the basic theory works.)

She had it so firmly in hand that I just made the salad, until I saw she was going to put the pasta into water that was not vigorously boiling.  Debbie and I jumped right on her case and insisted she get it to a rolling boil, and she wanted to know why.

Fortunately we were able to trot out our McGee and read her what the Maestro had to say: moisture needs to penetrate the outer part of the pasta but not the core…

Mara’s a skeptic: her response was, “How does he know that?”