Image property of Mcclatchy-Tribune Information Services.
You know, someone keeps inventing solutions to problems that don't exist.
I read a story this morning about colorful cauliflower. Apparently some scientists with a lot of spare time on their hands, have figured out how to make cauliflower green, orange or purple. I don't get the attraction. It's still cauliflower, the second most hideous vegetable on the planet after Brussels sprouts.
One of the very helpful pieces of information in the article was not to store sh*tweed, I mean cauliflower, too long because it develops a skunky odor. Flash to the writer, it comes preskunked. Some people like, even love cauliflower. My mom loved the stuff.
My sainted mother died in 1988 at the young age of sixty-three. She died from complications of diabetes and hard living. I suspect eating her own cooking was also a factor.
My mother was not a good cook, very nearly killing us on more than one occasion. One problem was that she thought that refrigeration was overrated. It was not unusual for her to fry chicken in the morning and leave it sit out until we ate dinner at five.
One time when I was about eleven or twelve my mom made pizza for my friend Peter and me. This was in the days before the fast food pizza joints, at least in Bellevue, Nebraska. She didn't exactly have the actual ingredients to make pizza, so she made it with Bisquick, ketchup and Kraft American cheese slices. She insisted that it was basically the same as real pizza. It was thoroughly inedible. We choked down a bit and hide the rest under the couch until we could sneak it out of the house.
Another time someone gave her a bushel of peanuts, which she attempted to turn into peanut brittle. Unfortunately, she over cooked the sugar base and wound up with peanut brittle that was clear and had a terrible burnt taste. She told us we were going to eat it or else. I think we outlasted her on that one and she threw it out.
Mom had a love for odd vegetables, especially Brussels sprouts. She adored the little balls of puke juice. We were also subjected to kale, okra, egg plant and of course, cauliflower. A regular yukfest. We lived, literally surrounded by cornfields and we ate canned creamed corn. She served canned peas, little balls of gray-green mush.
My mom was also famous for her mashed potatoes, which were both lumpy and runny. She never actually owned a mixer so she would add too much milk to the potatoes and then mash them with a giant fork. As in most things, she worked on the "close enough" principle. There were many times when the mash potatoes literally ran on your plate.
Another favorite at our house was corn fritters. This involved dumping a can of corn into batter and then frying the resulting goop. These were actually pretty good. Mom believed that most things could be improved with a little frying, which isn't an entirely bad trait in a mom when you are a kid.
When people ask me why I don't eat beef, I tell them that my mother ruined it for me. We regularly had the cheapest cut of meat that she could find, because she believed that separated good cuts of beef from cheaps cuts, was a good pounding with a wooden meat mallet. She made meatloaf that was undercooked, at least for me, and filled with crackers and ketchup. Mom also believed that ketchup covered a multitude of culinary sins.
My mother had a co-conspirator in my father. As long as food was fried,, he was a happy guy. My mother would cook him bacon or sausage nearly every morning, topped by several eggs fried in the fat of the dead pig. My father's idea of a delicacy was creamed chipped beef on toast, which he referred to as SOS, or sh*t on a shingle.
Is it any wonder that I am a mess?
My mom has been dead for almost twenty years and I still think of her often. She was a wonderful woman. She was funny, a smart ass, kind, generous, a loyal friend and she took care of us the best she could given our family dysfunction. But she was a terrible cook.
Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky
6 comments:
I remember Grandma used to make this fudge that was really good. I always wished that she wrote down recipes so I could have made it myself after she was gone.
My grandma had similar skills. Her recipe for a grilled cheese sandwiche was two pieces of toast slathered with generic Miracle Whip with a cold slice of American cheese in between. Ugh!
She was, however, a saint.
Interesting isn't it how the memory of the food we ate and hated as kids sticks with us and it takes years to get over it. I'm still not all that keen on turnip even though I was lucky to have grandmothers and a mother whose cooking I think of now as comfort food and I wish they were around sometimes to serve up some more. But not the turnips - no thank you.
Ms Soup.
My mother was a fabulous cook--our recipes go way back-- fresh ingredients, lots of produce, soups--never anything processed. My dad always insisted that every dinner must start with a good fresh salad, so I could write a book on fresh salads-- I make some kind of salad at least once a day. I'm addicted to fresh foods. Spaghetti sauce from real tomatoes...
The trick with brussels sprouts is to slice out the bitter stinky centers, and sautee the little leaves.
I love Tapas--the little dishes of Spain-- that reminds me of how my parents ate.
Oh, and my mother did not know how to cook at all until she learned from my dad's mother & grandmother at age 20. amazing! I grew up cooking.
This post is making me hungry--that peanut brittle and ketchup pizza sounds good. okra and puke juice not so much, but the peanut brittle had to be good, dude!
Post a Comment