RECIPE

Click on the link above for recipes for Eggs Goldenrod, Grandma's hekka, Exotic Chicken Curry and Black Magic Cake.

The first meal I ever cooked "all by myself" was a Mother's Day breakfast. It is a dish so dated I doubt there are many left who remember it: Eggs Goldenrod — hard-boiled egg yolks shredded into a white sauce over hot toast.

I made Mom stay in bed while I cooked. (She and I are both dawn risers, so that was an act of sacrificial love on her part.) She ooohed and aaaahed at the tray with its little flower vase. And she ate every bite (which I'm sure was sacrificial love, too, because I'll bet the white sauce was lumpy, the eggs weren't properly cooked and there may even have been a shell bit or two in there).

But that tray was set with love. And isn't it the love that makes the difference in good cooking? Even in professional cooking, you can taste it when a cook loves what she's doing.

In my family, as in many, food WAS love and — since the men participated only when the hibachi or barbecue was involved — it was from the mothers that most of the food-love came: My grandmother, Ida Sylva Duarte, and my mother, Addie Duarte Adams Rowland, as well as various aunties, godmothers and friends.

Many years ago, I wrote a little privately printed cookbook, "A Three-Generation Cookbook," with Grandma's, Mom's and my recipes, a Christmas gift for my mother. I still have a few copies around, but I never let anyone see them because I misspelled Portuguese (our ethnicity) throughout the entire text (who knew there was a second "u" in there?).

In the book, of course, I included Grandma's vinha d'ahlos, bacalhau stew and Portuguese bread recipes (as best I could remember them; her handwritten recipe book, to our great dismay, disappeared from the kitchen drawer sometime before her death).

But I also told how she made the most delicious chicken long rice (the secret is LOTS of ginger and a good chicken broth to start with) and gave her recipe for hekka, an everyday Japanese stir-fry that was one of my favorites as a child.

I've since learned, in writing "The Island Plate" (The Honolulu Advertiser/Island Heritage, 2005), that hekka was one of the earliest Asian dishes to be accepted by all cultures here. Strangely, it's little known today; ask a young person and they'll look at you blankly.

My grandparents had once owned a small hotel, the Haleakala Hotel in Wailuku, Maui, and Grandma had long before branched out from a strictly Portuguese menu plan.

Though Grandma taught me to love the kitchen, and let me watch while she worked (and, of course, lick the bowl when she baked a cake), it was actually my mother who taught me to cook.

She taught me to get pleasure from cooking with that first Mother's Day breakfast-in-bed experience, by being so appreciative of it that I felt not only loved but competent. (Even so: Isn't breakfast in bed overrated? It's so difficult to sit up properly and keep from spilling on the bedclothes.)

And my mother taught me because, as a career woman managing a job and a household, she had her hands full and I, a teenager and the only girl in the family, became her second-in-command. Each day when I got off the bus from Lahainaluna High School, I'd trudge up the drive to our apartment in Honokowai knowing there would be laundry to do and a note on the refrigerator in Mom's trademark scrawl saying something like, "Take the pork chops out of the freezer. Make rice. Wash some vegetables for the salad. Love, Mom."

Eventually, I got tired of the notes. So I got out the only cookbook in the house, "The Betty Crocker Cookbook" (you know, the one in the three-ring binder with the red cover and lots of pictures?) and started to cook. I made meat loaf and chicken divan and tuna noodle casserole, and then I started to invent stuff, such as a rice pilaf that became my stepfather's favorite.

Mom didn't have much time for cooking, but when she did it, she did it well. She made these amazing barbecued ribs that we'd always serve when we had a backyard party. I'd put her Swedish meatballs up against anyone's (the secret is baking them in a broth that is absorbed by the meatballs as they slowly cook). She made the best fruitcake on the planet.

She doesn't make fruitcake anymore, so I've got the last one she gave us in the freezer, and I just can't bring myself to bust it out. Similarly, I kept the last jar of Grandma's guava jelly in the cupboard until the metal cap rusted through.

Mom's true specialty is this casserole she served whenever we had people over for a sit-down dinner. It's a dish she got from a friend of hers, the late Sheila Hassell, a lovely and gracious hostess herself. She called it Exotic Chicken Curry because, in those days, anything with spices in it was "exotic." The dish is really a richer version of chicken divan, but it's great for company because you can make the whole thing ahead of time, refrigerate it and then just pop it in the oven while you're having pupu and drinks.

My other "kitchen mother" is my godmother, Cyrilla Medeiros of Wailuku. I used to love going to her neat little house on Halenani Drive with the big backyard and the tidy kitchen where there ALWAYS were (and still are) cookies — crisp, buttery cookies. And at Christmas, she makes this turkey stuffing with vinha d'ahlos (pickled roast) in it that just slays me. If I'm home for Christmas, she saves me a little plastic container of it.

She taught me about using fresh herbs: She always has Portuguese parsley (that's what we call flat-leaf parsley) growing in a bunch at the side of the house, and she always cuts me some; I've grown some from seed from her yard. But the thing I remember most is her chocolate cake with icing as white and fluffy as a cloud, and an old-fashioned creamy filling. Lord, I love that cake. I'm so glad that scratch cakes have made a comeback, and whenever I bake one, I think of her.