As the title implies, “The Happy Cookbook” – by me and my wife Kathy – is a collection of over 100 easy and delicious recipes that make people happy. The instant we see the meal or smell the aroma of it, it activates the nostalgia department of our brains and we are transported back to a happy time in our lives.

Many of the recipes are from famous Americans who love food, (Dr. Oz, Sean Hannity and Dana Perino, to name a few) and every recipe has a story to explain why those meals are important to somebody.

But many more are from the Doocy family kitchen that we have either invented or picked up from friends and family members over the last 30 years.

Just know we are a typical family – Kathy does almost all cooking indoors and I do most of the grilling outside. One night when the kids were young I made myself a bet that I could make an entire meal on our Weber grill and never dirty a single pot or pan.

“Mommy! Daddy’s baking brownies on the barbecue!” our youngest announced to Kathy, who then started a clock in her head until the time that I would admit that was a dumb idea and that brownies and grills don’t mix.

Game on!

The chicken, rosemary potatoes, blue cheese bread and corn on the cob were easy – I made them all the time. I just knew that the brownies would be a culinary showstopper that our family would talk about for years to come.

“They’re perfect!” I announced as I waved the brownie pan (the only pan I used) under the nose of my wife, who seemed genuinely delighted. Once the content of the pan had cooled down, I started to cut it into squares, but the knife would not go any deeper than about half an inch.

Apparently, Duncan Hines’ kitchen technicians had meant it when they called for a conventional oven, not an outdoor furnace. The brownie top looked perfect, but the bottom of the pan, closest to the 75,000 BTUs, had fused and melted together into a 9 x 13-inch carbon briquette.

Flop sweat beading on my forehead, I remembered that we’d bought a specialty knife we saw on TV that could be used to cut beer cans and rain gutters. Retrieving it from the pile of other never-used miracle products, I was able to cut about a dozen 2-inch brownie squares that were soft on the top and concrete on the bottom.

Next, my plan was to essentially fillet each brownie, cutting the soft top from the rock-hard bottom. And that’s exactly what I did on two brownies. On the third I used too much pressure on a part I thought was hard but was actually soft, and the knife flew out of the brownie and into my hand. It took about a second for my brain to process the fact that I’d just cut off my fingertip!

With blood squirting everywhere, Monty Python style, my wife calmly told me to go to the hospital emergency room. But I was the bullhead who hadn’t yet met his insurance deductible for the year, so I bandaged and Neosporined my finger and 10 minutes later returned to the blood-spattered table.

One of my joker kids used driveway chalk to draw a murder victim outline around the brownie pan. They watched too much TV back then.
While I triaged myself, Kathy had served the dinner, so returning to the table I laid the two perfectly carved brownie squares on a paper plate for dessert. They looked blood-free to me.

“Dad, you can’t make us eat them!”

And nobody did, except me. My brownie was baked to a tasty O-negative, without a doubt the most painful dessert I’d ever created.

I can laugh about it now, because it’s a true story from our family’s history. All the kids remember it as if happened yesterday, because shared family experiences around the grill or the stove or dinner table are the things they’ll remember the rest of their lives. This is where those happy recipes that we detail in our book are born.

The hardest part of cooking for our family has been the fact that our kids grew up. They went from fussy eaters, to big eaters, to college kids (who wanted Buffalo sauce on everything), and now they’ve graduated from us and live somewhere else.

The nights of our big noisy family meals are over, but thankfully a couple times a year we’re all able to get together and I’ll make them eggs in a nest for breakfast and Kathy will roast the peppers for her red pepper pasta.

Family life comes and goes in phases and right now we’re at the stage where weeknights at 6 p.m., it’s just Kathy and me and we’re waiting for the kids to return home.
The grill is empty, but I can have a brownie baking in there in less than 15 minutes.