When I was a kid growing up males weren't allowed to cook, in fact they weren't allowed in the kitchen except to peel potatoes or dry dishes. My mother was the kitchen Nazi. The kitchen was her domain and she didn't want males messing it up. It was always spotlessly clean and in order. The fingerprints on the refrigerator handle were wiped clean every day. In her mind, my mother kept a precise inventory of all the food and she had all the meals and snacks planned out a week in advance.

My mother was born in Czechoslovakia but she was neither Czech nor Slovak. She was German and her family was part of a large German population that lived in western Czechoslovakia; a population which Hitler used to justify his invasion of Czechoslovakia. When Nazi tanks rolled into my mother's sleepy little farming village she and her family celebrated. My mother eagerly joined the Hitler Youth Corps and prayed for a German victory. But eventually Hitler started losing the war and things got rough. Food suddenly became very scarce and had to be severely rationed. I have heard tales from my mother how during this time there were days when the family only had a small loaf of bread to eat for the entire day or how they would only have meat to eat maybe once a month. Every scrap of food was meticulously proportioned among the family. Sweets and desserts were unheard of.

So for the first 13 years of my life I ate absolutely nothing but my mother's cooking. Well, okay, we did eat out once but only once. It was June 7th, 1968; the day after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. The assassination had nothing to do with why we ate out, though. It just helps me remember the date. We had just arrived in El Paso after moving from Maryland. My mother's kitchen was not yet unpacked and everyone was very tired. That's why we ate out. We went out to a "hamburger drive-in" and ate hamburgers in the car. It was the best hamburger I've ever had.

I didn't even have my first pizza until I was fourteen! My first date, my first kiss, and my first pizza all came on the same day. (And that's how I remember that.) No, pizza is Italian and my mother didn't do Italian. She didn't cook French, English, Spanish, Mexican, or Oriental food, either. There were only two kinds of food she cooked; German and Polish. Having married a Pollock, she learned to cook Polish food in order to satisfy his gastronomical cravings.

So for the first 13 years of my life I ate only German and Polish food and since I only ate my mother's German and Polish food I really didn't know how it measured up to German and Polish standards. For all I knew she could have been making it all up. As a teenager I was enthralled with all the other kinds of food out there and I enthusiastically endeavored to try them all. But my passion was still centered around trying the foods and not cooking them. My passion for cooking would take a few years longer to ignite.

Since males weren't allowed in the kitchen I didn't know the first thing about cooking. Thanks to my mother, I was utterly clueless and helpless. But that started to change the day I turned 16. That was the day I started my very first job. That was also the day I ate Kentucky Fried Chicken for the very first time. That first job, by the way, was at Kentucky Fried Chicken. My first job was as a cook! Utterly, clueless me working in a kitchen! Suddenly, I had a domain that was a kitchen and I found that I liked it very much. I learned how to boil water and other kitchen basics and slowly learned how to master that domain. My passion for cooking began there and started growing.

I was eighteen years old when I moved out of the house and into a fancy townhouse. I was now a manager at Kentucky Fried Chicken and making "tons" of money. My mother donated a box of pots and pans and other kitchen paraphernalia and she also gave me a small collection of index cards. "Recipes for some of your favorite meals," she indicated. On the index cards were recipes for my favorite meals that she had cooked over the course of my childhood. Of all the German and Polish meals my mother cooked, my very favorite was her gulasch, which was a German variety of gulasch. (It's slightly different than Hungarian Gulasch.) That index card was on top.

So it was in my eighteenth year when I had my very own personal home kitchen. I set out to learn how to cook all sorts of dishes. I bought a cookbook but I also used my mother's recipes on those index cards. Several of my first meals were from those recipes. It was during this year that I invited a female over to my home for dinner for the first time. I cooked for a woman for the very first time! And what did I cook? My mother's gulasch.

Now I must point out that now my gulasch is distinctly different from my mother's. I have a problem with recipes. I invariably stray. Over the course of my life I have eaten Hungarian gulasch and several different kinds of gulasch. I read up about it and checked out many other recipes. My gulasch transformed over the years as I constantly tweaked it to make it better. I found out that my mother's recipe wasn't fully authentic. My mother believed that garlic is evil and never used it or allowed it in her kitchen. But I learned that garlic is an essential component of any good gulasch. My mother's gulasch was good--and I didn't know any better--but gulasch with garlic was even better. Way better. Nowadays, my gulasch hardly resembles my mother's gulasch but my mother's gulasch is where it all started. That's why I named it Czechoslovakian gulasch; in honor of her. After all, she was born in Czechoslovakia. And besides, "Czechoslovakian gulasch" draws more attention at dinner parties than "German gulasch" or "Hungarian Gulasch."

As the years went by my own recipe for gulasch continued to develop and a tradition began to develop, too. My gulasch became my meal of choice to cook at times of celebration. If I got fired from a job or experienced some other joyous event, the first thing I would do is cook up a big pot of gulasch and invite friends over to break bread with me. Food is a big part of celebration and when cooked and eaten with that attitude becomes energized. The attitudes we hold while cooking and eating is embedded in our foods and we then consume those attitudes, feeding and intensifying those attitudes. The more we eat with an attitude of celebration the more we will have to celebrate.

I was nineteen when I got married the first time. Can you guess what the very first meal I cooked for her was? That's right. Gulasch. Several years later, gulasch was the very first thing I cooked for my second spouse. Back then when I was a young whippersnapper gulasch was always the first meal I would cook for a woman. For me, gulasch was the way to a girl's heart.

When I was 26 years old I found myself living in Los Angeles. I was rather unhappy for several reasons. First of all, my honey had dumped me and I was "alone." Secondly, I was working at a very boring job that was going nowhere. And thirdly--and most importantly--I wasn't writing. I had a bad case of writer's block which had been going on for two years. I had recently built a little bonfire into which I fed most of my writing, and that helped a lot, but I still had not actually started writing. It was bubbling up inside me, though, and I was ready to burst. But I couldn't get myself to start and I didn't know what to start on. I was adrift.

At my job I worked with clothing (how incredibly boring!). It was so hard to go to work each morning. It became torture just to make it through the day at work. But then one day I got a letter from my honey. I lived just a few blocks away from where I worked so I cam home each day for my lunch hour. This is also when I checked my mail. I was shocked to receive a letter from my honey (how did she get my address?) and I was even more shocked when I opened the envelope. There was a single sheet of paper in the envelope and in the center of that sheet was written just one word: "Yum."

Well, that one word shook me to the core, so to speak. It was the perfect word said in the perfect way to completely shatter my reality. How could I go back to work from lunch after that? I didn't. I immediately without hesitation quit my job. Instead of going back to work I went to the grocery store and got all the necessary ingredients to make my Czechoslovakian gulasch. I called a couple of friends and invited them over to break bread with me in celebration of my freedom. Oh, what a delicious meal!

The next morning, instead of going to work, I got the typewriter out and started writing. To my surprise, the words came gushing out in an unstoppable torrent. The writer's block was completely gone. I proceeded to shut out the rest of the world and I wrote and wrote and wrote nonstop for five weeks. I wrote in the morning, afternoon, and evening. The writing started the second my fingertips hit the typewriter keyboard. I only stopped to sleep, bathe, cook, and eat. I left the apartment only to go to the grocery store. I was like the mad scientist who locks himself in his lab and works nonstop until his formula is perfected. I was completely obsessed and it felt great!

I wrote a novel during those five weeks. As the novel came to a close so did the torrent that was gushing through me. It was like somebody turned a valve and it all abruptly stopped. It was a good thing, though, because I had no money coming in during that time and I was suddenly in dire straits. There was no more food left in the fridge and I had no money left and the rent was past due. It was necessary that I return to "reality" lest I end up on the street (with no place to plug in my electric typewriter). So I shut the typewriter down and returned to a normal life. But oh! Those five weeks are a memory deeply cherished. That's what I wanted to do on a full-time basis. Those five weeks served as a goal or ideal that I wanted to return to someday. And to think, it all started with a pot of Czechoslovakian gulasch!