Difficulty Level Easy

When I first started taking cooking seriously, I worked through a lot of recipes in the Good Housekeeping Cookbook that my mother gave me when I left home. It was a workman-like cookbook, perfect for the fledgling cook. I had cooked at home, of course, but our idea of a delicious dinner was chicken cooked in Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, served over Minute Rice (or Instant Potatoes!) and canned peas as the vegetable. This is not to make fun of my mother in any way, but she was a working woman and needed to be able to get dinner on the table quickly when she got home. In fact, everyone I knew had a mom who cooked like that. It was the 60's and 70's version of the special sauces people buy now to pour over chicken and the packaged foods they eat.

So this cookbook was a bit of a revelation for me, recipes for exotic sounding dishes like Beef Stroganoff and Pommes Anna that you cooked from scratch. As I got a bit more confident I wanted to try something that looked really difficult, but would be impressive for guests, so I tried a spinach souffle. It turned out to be really easy, but the wow factor was great for my friends, who by and large, didn't cook. I haven't made a souffle for years, but I've been thinking about them for some reason, and then I happened upon this recipe that sounded quite nice. I have a lovely souffle dish, but it wasn't large enough for this recipe, so I ended up baking it in a casserole, so I didn't get that nice height that comes with a real souffle dish, but it was delicious none the less.

Thirty years later, that cookbook is still being put to good use. I gave it to my daughter when she left home.

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