“I make a darn good minestrone myself.” She says to me, as I’m about to serve her a dinner of my own version of this Italian classic.
“Yikes! No pressure here!” I’m thinking to myself but wouldn’t dare say out loud.
Mind you… I know that my recipe for minestrone is about as good as it gets but intimidation, nevertheless, settled in.
My dear cousin Dinah was in town and sitting at my table with her mother, my Aunt Agnes, for dinner that night. The “someone in the kitchen with Dinah” that evening was me. Dinah was here from California on her annual visit to see family and play catch up. Dinah and I grew up making many special memories of times together, especially with our mothers who took us on one outing after another.
Times at the beach, play times in our homes, taking the bus downtown to have lunch at the Rhodes department store, times at holidays and even a trip or two together. Dinah had a stream in her backyard with a downward sloped yard on one side and a slight hill on the other. We crossed that stream countless times to climb the slight hill and spend many an hour under the shade of willow trees with our dolls, tea parties and pure imagination.
And then there were the wonderful summers, as young wives and mothers, that we spent with our own children at the same beaches and backyards where new memories were made. To say there is history is an understatement.
Now… somewhere along this history, Dinah married Jer who is Italian through and through. So when she tells me how good her minestrone soup is… I’m thinking that I have just made a huge mistake in serving up soup for dinner that night.
Flashback:
Shortly after my marriage in 1970 and the birth of my first child in 1972, the crock pot made a spectacular appearance on the cooking playfield. I’d never heard of it and thought it was a new invention at the time. Turns out it was invented back in the early forties and finally manufactured and sold in the early fifties with the name Naxon Beanery. When the inventor retired, he sold the company to Rival and the Beanery was re-named, re-merchandised and the crockpot was born. My mother never had one of these “beanery” things or I would have remembered this method of cooking.
As a consequence, I was thrilled with the prospect of putting food into a pot in the morning and having dinner ready at night. After all, I was all consumed with the care of a new baby and then a growing toddler and then, barely two years later, another pregnancy. Whatever I could put into that pot was a welcome respite from cooking dinner every night.
Recipes for crockpot cooking were appearing everywhere, including in the cooking section of our own local paper. There it was! The best (BRAVO) minestrone soup. Of course, I didn’t know that… until making it for the first time and getting thanks for such a good meal with the proclamation that “we should have this dinner once a week.” High praise indeed!
Now back to Dinah in my kitchen.
With no other recourse but to serve up my soup and have it stand up against Dinah’s recipe, I sat down at the table and awaited her review of mine versus hers.
She took a spoonful and…
“Oh yes!” she sighs with resignation. “This is better.”
“Glad you like it.” was my simple reply. I must admit that, inwardly, I smiled.
So… that recipe has been around over forty years now. It’s a great comfort food for the beginning of fall…. full of fresh vegetables, pasta and parmesan. I still make it for company and always get asked for the recipe. I have shared its goodness with many.
In case you are curious, I shall share it once again.

While I don’t presume that this is a cooking blog, it seems that I get quite a response when I post anything about food. Even new followers with cooking blogs of their own make me think that I should re-assess.
Yet no! I started out with a purpose of story telling about family memories and will stick to my purpose.
However, memories of good times do often happen around good meals and good food.
Anyone remember the harvest gold and avocado green of the 70’s? It was during this initial boom that Robert and Shirley Hunter received their own avocado-toned Crock Pot as a gift. Now on display at the National Museum of American History.
Wonder whatever happened to my first Rival crockpot. More likely at the Goodwill rather than a museum. Alas!