Keeping health issues in mind, Chesapeake husband creates thoughtful meals

By Theresa Curry

Correspondent

When John Herochik cooks, he thinks of his mother, Helen  Kustura, the oldest of 12 children growing up in New Jersey during the Depression. Helen, the daughter of Russian immigrants, lived with her family in a two-bedroom house, known locally as the home with the last working outhouse in Perth Amboy. 

“I think they decommissioned the outhouse in the 1950s,” said Herochik who now lives in Chesapeake. Despite this dubious distinction, he loved going to the small home for family celebrations, crowding in with the cousins still at home and the aunts and uncles who celebrated holidays with Grandma’s cooking: huge hams, beets and horseradish and buttery cookies stuffed with sweetened walnuts.

When his own mother cooked, he paid attention.

“She often needed help with some of the baking,” he said. “I was the one who would grind the nuts when she made cookies, and I just naturally began to make some things on my own.”

Helen produced great meals from four pans and three feet of working space, Herochik said. “I’ve got lots of pots and pans and gadgets, and she would laugh at me.”

Helen made traditional food like fried chicken and spaghetti and meatballs, and also shared her mother’s love of Russian food. “She made the best cabbage rolls,” Herochik said. “They were always stuffed with ground meat and rice, rolled tightly and perfectly formed.  

 “One of the greatest things I remember was all of us sitting around the table,” Herochik said. His sister, who was older, would discuss politics and unions with his father, a laborer at a chemical plant. Helen worked as a housekeeper and cafeteria worker at the junior high school. There were no worries about latchkey kids in those days, even on the streets of a northeastern industrial city, Herochik said: “We just spent all our time outside running around.”

Herochik lost his father when he was 11.  He grew up being comfortable in the kitchen, and his house was often filled with his mother’s huge family.  Many of the meals were filling and heavy on the fat and sugar, he said. That changed when he met Shelley,  a woman he hired to work at a nonprofit theater company he founded right after college. Shelley, now his wife and a teacher at Cambridge College in Chesapeake, is a diabetic.

“My mother figured out a way to make nut-filled butter cookies so Shelley could eat them,” Herochik said. “That was something that endeared her to Shelley right away.”

Following his mother’s example, Herochik learned to cook using fructose rather than sugar to sweeten desserts and quick breads, as in the zucchini bread recipe that follows.

“Fructose is sweeter than sugar, so I generally use about a third less,” he said.

In the zucchini bread, he uses only half the sugar called for in the original recipe. Fructose – not to be confused with high-fructose corn syrup – also helps baked goods retain moisture.

The Herochiks left Perth Amboy years ago.  Now he works as operations manager for the department of civic facilities for the city of Norfolk.

His culinary repertoire changed again when Shelley was diagnosed with kidney problems and had to cut out sodium and potassium.

“This took a lot of research,” Herochik said. “There seems to be potassium in just about everything, especially fruits and vegetables. Dairy products are also limited. Berries are OK, and so are apples, he found out, so he does a lot with those fruits and tries to use fresh herbs and spices to make up for the lack of salt in the food he cooks at home. He generally accompanies his salmon cakes (recipe below) with polenta flavored with fresh rosemary.

It was a happy day  when he figured out how to make potatoes – generally high in postassium – so Shelley could eat them.  “I cut and soak them,” he said. 

After he changes the water several times, most of the potassium is gone. Best of all, says Shelley, is the creativity and thought that goes into every one of her husband’s meals:  “Rare are the times when something comes out of our kitchen tasting bland or expected,” she writes. “He is truly an inspired chef.”

Theresa Curry, flavor@pilotonline.com