The Mother?

I'm a bit of a foodie - a decent cook, though not a chef. I cook at least as well as any of the women I've dated, probably better than some. My real interest in good food came from The Inn at Turner's Mill. I'd won chili cook-offs before and always been a pretty fair cook, but not until my time at the Mill did I really start to take an interest in really good food.

These days there are loads of places to find both inspiration and information on how to cook anything I'm interested in. I also like to put my own twist on things. Lately I've become very interested in making my own salad dressings. My favorite is balsamic vinaigrette, but I don't want to overdose on that - wonderful as that dressing always tastes to me. I'm lucky that I've worked around some very inspiring chefs - Tom Ward, Sean Monday, Brandt Evans, Alan Ashkinaze, Paul Minnilo and Chris DiLisi. Oh I've watched, I've listened and I've learned.

As one might expect, I keep balsamic vinegar around my kitchen. I thought I knew a thing or two about balsamic vinegar, but I was...well, mistaken. After my workout yesterday, I stopped at the store and bought some stuff to make a healthy lunch of salmon with a salad of baby Romaine & vegetables. It's so easy to make balsamic vinaigrette and since it's been awhile...

Here's where a surprise showed up: I reached for the bottle of balsamic vinegar and started to measure out 1/3 cup for the dressing. That's when I noticed a big fat glob of gooey...stuff in the bottle. Never saw anything like it. It was a bit on the disgusting side, but I tasted the vinegar itself and it tasted perfectly fine. It didn't look like the glob was going to make it out of the bottle so I proceeded to add the rest of my ingredients to the mixer; brown sugar, chopped garlic cloves, dash of sea salt, cracked black pepper, some fresh lemon juice and then I added the oil slowly.

I nailed the dressing perfectly and made a mental note to ask either the chefs or one of the servers I work with about this strange mass in the vinegar bottle. When I got to work the first person I saw was Eric - a guy who has been a chef and got into cooking because he loved dressings. I told him about the strange gooey glob and he calmly smiled and said:

Eric: ah, that's the mother...

Me - thinking: the wha?? mother what??

Me - speaking: The mother

Eric: yeah, the mother - it's what the vinegar starts from. 

Me - thinking: No sh*t. Is he messing with me? Mother huh? Never heard of it.

Me, speaking: How did it get in there? Do I need to throw away the vinegar?

Eric: It was probably in there when you bought it - might have grown a bit, the vinegar is fine...

Me - thinking: Grown a bit?? Will it keep growing and burst into my cupboard leaving a blackish-brown mass and a mess to clean up? Isn't this how The Blob started?

Me, speaking and trying not to appear totally ignorant: Huh, no kiddin' - it was in there when I bought it. Yeah I wondered what the hell it was, I mean I tasted the vinegar and it seemed fine, so of course (mock confident tone here) I figured there was no problem and I didn't panic....

Eric: yup, it's fine.

Me: cool.

Mind you I believed him, hard as it was to wrap my mind around this "mother" - and in the back of my mind I wondered why I've never heard anything about this, but no matter. I did kind of want to get the other guys in the kitchen to give me their take on it, but somehow I knew even without asking anyone that it was alright and nothing to worry about. If you have balsamic vinegar in your kitchen, you might take a look and see if your mother is in there - because if you've never seen your mother, I can assure you it's a bit of a shock when you first meet up. That is all.