Preface To The Ginger Show: I Cooked With Ginger Tonight!

(No, not that Ginger! Image from here.)

While Tina Louise is definitely the Ginger of my childhood, I wasn't cooking with her tonight, nor was I watching Gilligan's Island while I was cooking.  Come to think of it, I haven't watched an episode of Gilligan's Island in decades.  But they're burned into my brain from childhood, so I don't have to.  No, I was cooking with the root, which I hate having to peel, & also I don't enjoy grating it either.

If you bet me that I hadn't actually eaten ginger in anything other than gingerbread or ginger ale before I was twenty, I would take that bet - if you showed ginger root to me when I was fifteen, I wouldn't know what it was, let alone that it was edible.  To be fair, I was mostly confused & ignorant when I was fifteen, so it's not that I was simply culinarily ignorant.  Although I was.

My mother, in her eighties, once asked my sister Karin, "Did I cook for you when you were a kid?"  She wasn't getting senile - well, she was, but this wasn't an example of that - my mother was kind of realizing she hadn't been a very good cook.  I can remember maybe five meals we regularly had, & they weren't of the "more than one item" variety - we might have bread, but hardly any sides.  I can imagine my mother lacklusterly listening to her mother trying to teach her how to make meals.  Almost certainly my mother had a very small repertoire of spices - salt, pepper, perhaps some paprika - although she told me she found paprika a bit too spicy for her tastes.

This is sad but true: I didn't eat Indian food or Chinese food until I was in at least my third year of college.  I wasn't too adventurous but I also didn't really know about the other cuisines.  & I really didn't start cooking in earnest until maybe a little over ten years ago.  That's when I became familiar with ginger.  Which I cooked with tonight!  I made a recipe called "Thai Golden Curry."  It took an eighth of a cup of ginger.  I was supposed to grate it, but I did not.  I chopped it as small as I could.

It occurs to me that I don't really know the relationship between the ginger I cook with in non-dessert foods & the ginger in gingerbread, how it works, what the story is.  I must do some research.

& for the record, I was way more into Mary-Ann than Ginger.  When I was like eight.