A True Home Grown Cook with Zeal and a Passion
Told in her own words – Doren PerdieI was ten years old when my Mom put a Parent’s Day Cookbook in my hands. My Dad was already working two jobs and there was not enough money to pay the bills. To help out, Mom decided to get a job at the Library. I remember her saying as she left for her first day: “You like cooking, so now it’s your job”. In retrospect, I believe books were far more interesting to Mom than cooking ever was.
Mom did not give me “full rein”on cooking because she still bought the same old things to make. I did not let that deter me. I just became more creative with the ingredients that she gave me. I was always very artistic in anything I did, drawing pictures from an early age, and starting the first musical drama theater with my best friend Bob Viera in the local recreation center, at eleven years old. It was not unusual for me to take on cooking with a zeal even if it was only for the family dinner table. I used to run home from my after school activities to cook dinner. It was fun to me. I suppose my friends in school thought I was crazy. I also learned a lot from my grandmother. When I turned twelve I spent the summer in Puerto Rico. Her family was from the Canary Islands and Majorca so her influences of cooking came from the lands of the castilian countryside of Spain. I did not speak a word of spanish but we communicated through cooking just fine. I did learn awfully fast not to get attached to the chickens in the her backyard as they frequently wound up cooked on the dining room table. Grandma had an incredible backyard filled with tropical fruits and vegetables. It was so colorful it was like walking through a coloring book. I enjoyed cooking with all those vegetables , and fruits and herbs – and I still do today.
As time went on Mom would come home from the library with discarded cookbooks that I enjoyed perusing and picking out recipes that I could change. I also loved the Frugal Gourmet & Julia Child’s shows on TV. They kept me laughing and running from one end of the kitchen to another to cook, while they cooked. I didn’t always have the ingredients for their recipes so I became very adept at making my own substitutions.
I continued to cook right through college and career moves, for family and friends, but never as a means of support. Always in the back of my head was the thought that I would like to open up my own little cafe. Over the years anyone I met who would give me the time I would teach me something about the way they cooked from my russian/oriental/german friends to my italian husband.
When my husband and I were looking to relocate our family to Pennsylvania we fell in love with the town of Jim Thorpe. There it was, nestled in a valley on a beautiful fall day on the edge of the Poconos. It looked like we were surrounded by a painter’s pallet. I took one look around and then at my husband and said “This is where we are moving and I want to open a cafe.” He said “Hey -as long as we could put computers in it I’m game.” That was the beginning of our adventure into the restaurant business.
Eventually the computers were switched out for internet access and more tables for food as that’s what my patrons wanted. As the years have gone by since that fateful day in 1999, I have loved and enjoyed the journey through our ever changing life with food. It is a learning experience every single day. Like the ingredients given to me to cook with by my Mom in the very beginning; I am forever creatively adapting to changing menus, food availabilities, and frugal and flush times with the same zeal and a passion that I had in my youth. I AM that ten year old girl with her new cookbook everyday.