The story of mustgo

Writing the first entry to a blog feels like my first day of school back when I was young.  I loved the fresh newness of my brightly colored notebooks, the crisp white pages just waiting to be filled with words. Except now, I'm much older and much more anal about what I write. At least the "backspace" key is easier to use than making a mess of eraser shavings and pencil smudges. 

My fondest memories of my childhood take place in the kitchen.  Whether I was on the floor throwing a temper tantrum, huddled close to the heating outlet with a blanket draped over my shoulders on a cold winter morning, or making "experiments" with the spice cabinet, it seems that we were always in the kitchen. 

We always ate well in my house. Give my mom an hour and three basic ingredients, and she could whip up a meal deserving of a fancy waiter and dimly lit candles. Even now, it seems like there is always an abundance of food in the refrigerator--and not the usual "refrigerator food", like ketchup and milk. Regular staples that often appear in my mom's fridge include (but are not limited to): lemon and pepper grilled asparagus, homemade brie cheese, fruit cakes, mango lime salsa with freshly-caught salmon...  no big deal.

If, however, for some reason my mom came home from work and was absolutely too exhausted to dive straight into cooking one of her three-course meals, she made what we called a "mustgo" dinner. She'd just take any old leftovers out of the fridge, usually letting each of us three kids pick exactly what we wanted, and whip up a big dinner of everything that "must go" from the fridge. There you have it: the story of mustgo.