About > Marni Ginther
Marni Ginther
{Editor-In-Chief}
My mother is not a bad cook. But you wouldn’t know it from some of the family dinners we used to eat.
She was a busy career woman. She believed in cooking large quantities of food on Sunday night and making it last the whole week. “This lasagna will be delicious after the flavors have been sitting together in the fridge overnight,” she’d say. That’s true only to a point.
Her most infamous creation was the chicken soup my brother and I affectionately dubbed “The Sewage.” She didn’t skin the chicken or chop the vegetables into small bits. Her’s was a rustic style. My brother and I would sit in the kitchen staring at broccoli stalks, chicken chunks and pale carrots forming a small swamp-like landscape in our bowls. “You’re not leaving this table until you finish your dinners,” Mom would say. The sun would set. The soup would grow cold. Once, my brother fell asleep in his chair two hours after dinner was over—his sewage untouched on the table.
We laugh about it now, but there were moments when that sewage was the most contentious issue in our family. I love my mom. I just hate her chicken soup.