Dads create culinary stir

There are plenty of dads who feel just as at home with a spatula as with a saw, according to our readers who responded to a request for stories that celebrate dads who cook.

Many fathers have begun passing that spatula to the next generation of young cooks. Ingrid Smith, 8, and brother Peter, 5, have already learned a few skills of their own. "My dad, Dan Smith, is a great cook because he always cooks my favorite meals," writes Ingrid. "When he makes shrimp I help him take the skeletons off. My dad also likes to make disserts [sic]. Once he made really good pretzel cookies. They were so good that we had to make another batch."

"My daddy is a great cook," concurs Peter. "I like the pretzel cookies. I helped him dip them in chocolate and my Dad did the powdered sugar. My favorite thing to do when I help Daddy is tasting it to make sure it tastes good! My favorite part about his cookies is that he made them himself."

The value of cooking together is a reoccurring theme in many readers' letters.

"My husband, Michael Driggers, is a great cook and has taught me to experiment with flavor combinations and new foods," says Kristall Driggers. "We spend a lot of time cooking together as a family and our 6-year-old daughter is becoming a great cook already!"

Joanne Daniels' husband, Tod Daniels, is their family's head chef. "He took over the cooking when he was the one who got home first from work, and has done it for the last 20 years — everyday meals, holidays and dinner parties," says Joanne.

"He is a creative cook, and when you hear the cupboard and refrigerator doors opening and closing, accompanied by singing or whistling off-key, you know you're in for something good. We all love his cooking, but there is just one problem. He makes something delicious, and when he's asked for it again, he's forgotten how he made it and what he put into it. Life with Tod is just a series of unreplicated food events."

Stan Wheeler wooed his future wife, Donna, with lots of spice. "Over the past 25 years of marriage I have become the family cook because I enjoy cooking more than my wife does," he says. "I remember the first meal I ever cooked for her: a spaghetti with homemade sauce in which I inadvertently used cayenne pepper. The result was a spicy sauce which mostly ended up on her plate. She didn't actually strain the pasta through her fork, but it was close. Hopefully, I've improved a little since then."

Dad's Kitchen Sink Soup is stocked with ground beef and chunks of hot dogs. It's "a kid's favorite," says Robert Underwood, and just one of his specialties. He's gotten lots of experience over the years, cooking a couple of nights a week for several generations. "I am stepfather to a 13-year-old boy, and have two grown children from a previous marriage and two grandchildren," says Underwood.

Bunnee Butterfield's father, Glen, had a special knack with morning meals. "My father did ritual cooking — spaghetti every Saturday (with sauce he made himself, no recipe) — and Sunday morning breakfast so when his 'girls' (my sister, mother and I) got home from Mass, we had a wonderful pancake breakfast waiting for us," says Butterfield. "Sometimes he'd make the pancakes into shapes, sometimes he'd slice little sausages into rounds and pour the batter over them. But no matter what the variation, he would have pancakes, eggs and breakfast meat."

Dodging the lightening bolts, Butterfield confesses, "When Sister Mary told us to pray for the conversion of non-Catholics, I was reluctant to pray for my father since it would mean the end of Sunday breakfast!"

Megan Woo's father paid his way through college with various cooking jobs, and he taught her mother how to cook when they married. "My father grew up in an eating- and cooking-centric family and was taught to cook at a very young age," says Woo. "Of all the fancy, labor-intensive meals he's made for me over the years, I still love his jook the best. It's a simple, plain Chinese rice porridge that can be made from almost any type of animal carcass, but the family favorite has always been turkey. In fact, at Thanksgiving my family debates over who gets the turkey carcass. There are heated debates over proper jook accouterments, but in my family it's always served with potato chips, preserved Chinese turnips, sliced green onions and soy sauce."

"Sixty years ago my father, Duane H. Napen, crossed the Atlantic as part of the 'clean-up crew' of U.S. servicemen sent to Germany just after fighting ended in WWII," says Karen Grooms. "He was affectionately known as 'Cookie,' the cook, for the 1st Engineer Combat Battalion, 1st Infantry Division, or the 'Big Red One'.

Napen's experiences led to a lifetime of cooking, especially the traditional dishes of Germany and Poland. During his career with Bell Telephone, "Daddy worked on the progression of communications, from telephone to teletype to computers. He could fix them all, his brilliant mind conquering the inner mechanics of a rapidly changing tech world," says Grooms. "This Father's Day is indeed remarkable for our family as Daddy keeps beating the odds, bravely fighting MDS [Myelodysplastic syndromes], and we still get to see his smiling face in the kitchen."

Sometimes it's not simply the meals that dad cooked and put on the table that make the memories so poignant.

"My dad, Dale Hagen, wasn't much of a cook, but when it came to barbecuing, he was king," says Cathy Schmidt. "He knew how to spot a good cut of beef and used only salt and pepper. But what made Dad's steaks so special wasn't the seasoning — it was that between his wife and us five kids he always gave us the best cuts. We'd line up with our plates and he'd carefully pick a good one. When he finally got the last one on the grill I could tell it was shoe leather, and sometimes he'd ask for just a bite of ours. He died much too young, but I'll always remember his generosity."

CeCe Sullivan: csullivan@seattletimes.com