The First Sunday.

I had every intention of making some bratwurst this weekend. There were designs on spatzels and pretzels and lye baths. I definitely wanted to try my sausage making hand at knockwurst.

And then the weather launched us into the throes of early fall, and my attentions turned immediately toward comfort foods. While bratwurst does carry a certain comfort, once the weather turns, my stomach does as well. The sausage leaves fall off the stomach tree, to be replaced with soups and stews and longer, stronger dishes.

With that in mind, we’re going to turn our attentions toward another dish that’s become somewhat of an enigma to me. I’ve made it once before and it was amazing. I’ve never had it from an actual restaurant, despite there being two phenominal joints that specialize in it, just a hop, skip and jump away in Cleveland’s surprisingly rich Asian Community (more on that at a later date) So, The First Sunday, our dish will be Pho.

September Recipes.

September begins my favorite seasons of the year: Football and Fall.

There’s something about the weather change that makes me turn my culinary attentions toward slower foods; foods that stick to the ribs, the kind you eat at 3PM on Sunday afternoon, and debate how hungry for breakfast you are. On Tuesday.

Recently, however, a new love has made September even more worthwhile, one I’d heard of but hadn’t experienced until the last few years. Oktoberfest.

The Potato Inspiration.

If my mother had an enemy it would be the humble, innocent staple of our “Irish” upbringing the potato.

Years ago, my mother had my sisters and I over for Christmas. It was the first since she’d moved out of the house we’d grown up in, and she wanted us “together” again. There wasn’t much of a choice in the matter. Being poor at the time, we had no choice but to agree; our son, Cameron would have a fantastic Christmas, and we would help provide it to him, despite not being able to at the time.

Our family always ate Christmas Eve dinner since it was easier to manage kids who were on the cusp of the bad list not want to risk the chance Santa might check twice, rather than kids who just got what they’d waited all year for. Tradition continued this year as well, as we came over on Christmas Eve and waited for dinner.

“I’ll be right back,” my mother said after we’d been talking for a while. “I want to wrap these Christmas presents that I forgot about.” She disappeared into her room.

For three hours.

She emerged, lines across her face and clearly embarassed. “I fell asleep. Shut up. Let’s eat dinner.”

To be honest, I can’t remember what we had that night exactly, aside from the potatoes. There on each plate, was a magnificently large potato the kind you find on your plate at a steakhouse, the kind that are so impossibly large they cut one with a large fry at the fair. That potato. We’d always eaten what we called “Crunchy-skin potatoes” so that we, when eating the skin and the slight bit of pulp that sticks to the inside there would be a pleasing crunch.

My sister Emily cut first, and looked inside the potato with dismay. “Mom, there’s nothing in my potato,” she said, just on the verge of laughter.

I was next. Same result. Sure, at one time there was a substance known as potato meat inside this shell. And through the magic of magic, it had all disappeared into the ether.

My other sister, Kristen, my future wife, Jessica, my mom; same result. No potato. Mom giggled, which made me giggle, which made my sisters giggle, which made my son giggle, which made my future wife giggle. “I guess I shouldn’t have cooked them so long,” my mother cried out, laughing.

“How long did you cook these?” I asked.

“Eight hours.”

To this day, it’s become a joke whenever we have a family dinner. Mom invariably will ask “What can I bring”, to which we’ll reply emphatically “NOT Potatoes.”

Part of my inspiration for this project is stories like that. I want to be able to pass and create my stories and move them on for years. I want my failures to live on, I want my successes to live on even more. I want people to say “remember the time…” and we share a smile.

More than that, I want the people that come with it. Sure, if it was just my mother and I, it’d be funny. That it was (half) my family, made it all the better. Even more than that, I want to help create that for people. I want a friend who can’t cook say to me years down the road that the chicken dish I helped him learn how to make helped impress his future wife. I want my future wife to be able to cook a meal, or make something for a potluck.

I want to make friends with my culinary enemies. While I’ve embarassed my poor mother enough I’ve got my own demons to slay. But, that’s a post for another day.

About Sunday Food.

Before we get started here, we’re going to explore a few things. I’m going to go through my kitchen equipment, and show you a few of the contraptions and gizmos I have that will help me along in my processes. I’ll step-by-step on how to make a delicious, lip-smacking stock and a tasty broth (one will be vegetarian, the other meaty) to add richness to foods.

But first we need to get something out of the way, the question that’s central to this entire process: What is Sunday Food?

And So It Begins

My friends and I are nothing, if not challengers. Week in and week out, we challenge ourselves to reach new heights. Some of them have reverted to our neanderthal roots, and begun a search to make something — anything — out of tools they’ve made themselves. The participants there are at their very nature handy, whereas I can barely drive a nail if it’s in my car, let alone hammer one in, let alone create both the hammer and nail myself.

Others in our group, enjoy tasks to help change the world, even if it’s one person at a time. They’re eating locally, inspired by the locavore movement, a task I believe deserves kudos. However, it’s unrealistic for me, since I’ve got a near 10 year-old who refuses most of what’s good for him that isn’t meat.

I needed something for me. Something that could combine a few of my loves — cooking, writing, and photography — into a simple contest against myself.

And then, I remembered something I’ve missed greatly and something I look forward to when the weather turns cool, when the first footballs are kicked in American living rooms, when families come together and just enjoy each other’s companies during the Sunday Supper.

It was there the Sunday Cookery Challenge was born.

Growing up, we are mutts, though we define Irish on my mother’s side, German/English on my fathers. There are no meals of our heritage dishes as there would be in a Mexican or Italian home. My grandmother’s home rarely smellt of long simmering dishes of gravies, of meats roasted to impeccable donenesses with Yorkshire Puddings. We ate varieties, and enjoyed it. And yet, I secretly yearn for the long tables of cousins and second cousins and fifteenth cousins forty-six times removed. I want that Sunday meal to be perfect.

My favorite Thanksgiving memory, in fact, is just that. Nearly my entire mother’s family, crammed into two-thousand square feet, of which seemingly two hundred thousand is taken up by a table, so long, so thick, it was as if Paul Bunyan chopped the trees himself. There were turkeys as far as the eye could see, bowls of potatoes so deep it looked as we’d swam in each just months prior. Gravy boats were actual boats.

But, it wasn’t the food that did it. It was the togetherness. It was that each person that cooked and contributed to this meal — this meal that is at my thirty-three and one-half years on this planet the gold standard for any meal — did so with care. Did so with love. Did so with the idea in mind that they would eat, they would talk, they would laugh, and they would love.

And the Sunday Cookery Challenge was born of that fleeting moment, that fleeting memory that hadn’t crossed my mind in twenty-five or more years. The rules are simple and examples follow.