My mom and I are standing in her driveway, staring into the back of her new boyfriend’s pickup truck. 

            “Yup, them’s gonna make a good mountain oyster feed,” the new boyfriend, Loren, says with obvious pride.

            In the bed of his truck, a mound of raw, frozen bull testicles lay bundled in gallon-sized freezer bags. Each freezer bag holds about four pounds of mountain oysters, which amounts to about eight testicles per bag, all in all several hundred pounds of testicles. I’m not sure if I’m more disgusted by the magnitude of meat or by the fact that calling bull testicles “meat” might not be the right term.

 

She was a tough old broad. Alma Piwowarski , my late Great Grandmother, wasn’t your average Polish-American housewife. In 1933, she left her comfy suburban bungalow for the drudges of General Motors’ Turnstead Plant. For 41 years she served as a parts inspector.   But Grandma was no slouch in the kitchen. To this day, we serve many of her Polish delicacies at Christmas and Easter. These crispy chicken livers were one of her everyday favorites. According to my dad, Grandma loved to order these at a restaurant when she could find them. Now considered a throw back dish, chicken livers seem to have crept back into vogue. I noticed them the first time this summer at Michael Symon’s Roast in the historic Book Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit. Grandma Alma would have swooned over his perfectly prepared, flavor-packed morsels. But I have to say, after preparing grandma’s recipe at home, Piwowarski gave Symon a run for his money.

Serves 8, at minimum
 

I’ve always been a fan of ice cream, but I became especially interested in making ice cream last summer after my sister brought her new boyfriend to a family vacation. He came armed with an assortment of homemade ice cream recipes. They spent a large part of the week in the kitchen with their ice cream machine, cracking eggs and cooking mysterious custards over the stove, resulting in ridiculously tasty frozen confections. While I’ve gained a brother-in-law since then, I still haven’t acquired an ice cream maker.  I have realized, though, that I can achieve something similar without extra kitchen appliances.