As a follow up to “Potato Chips and Grapes” posted here on 1/30/09, I realize I have even more childhood food memories to share. First of all, I want to set the record straight, since my last blog focused on the less than appealing childhood traumas my mother set before me at the dinner table. She actually was and still is a very good cook, even though she’s in her 70’s now and is legally blind.
My favorite dish as a child was fried chicken. Oh, my gosh, I could eat my weight in it, I think. With real mashed potatoes and that thick homemade white gravy created from adding flour and milk to the pan drippings. My mouth waters just thinking about it. And nobody could make a pork roast better than my mother. I never mastered the art of making homemade gravy from meat drippings, but she could do it. She’d also make homemade noodles and was never satisfied with the results, but I loved them. They were thick and soft and delicious!
Occasionally, my mother would make some special kind of chocolate cake. It might have been out of a box mix for all I know, but she’d serve it warm and she’d make a war, chocolate sauce and dribble over it. It melted in your mouth.
She also did something with cinnamon toast, and here the memory gets fuzzy. I think she’d soak bread in milk, sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on it and bake it in the oven. Now there was a breakfast a child could enjoy on a cold winter morning before school.
Sometimes she’d make hamburgers or hotdogs in the mornings and wrap them in foil to put in our lunch bags. Of course, by lunch time, they weren’t warm any more, but I think we were the only kids in the lunchroom eating hamburgers.
In that last blog, I didn’t elaborate on my mother’s several-month-long experiment with instant milk. Evidently, this was the housewives’ magical trick for stretching the food budget pennies in the late 60’s. But the milk tasted nothing like milk. It was more like white, vaguely flavored water. Even worse, in my mind at least, than drinking the milk that had been drawn straight out of the cow I had to drink when I visited my cousins in Missouri. Please, please, can’t we just have the milk out of the carton that’s been pasteurized and hormoned to death? That’s the kind I like.
My mother is famous for her apple salad. In some circles, it may be known as Waldorf Salad. Hers is a mixture of apples, celery and mayonnaise, I believe. To which she always added walnuts. There’s a weird thread running through our family. Out of her four children, none of us like walnuts or pecans. She knew this, but she always made the salad with nuts in it. Which we would do our best to pick out and hide and try to get away without eating. To this day, I cannot stand the taste or texture of walnuts or pecans, the exception being if they are ground up finely enough so that I don’t actually have to bite into them. But I always wondered why she couldn’t divide that salad and put nuts in one half for her and Dad to eat and leave the other half nut-less for the kids. I think she just never thought of doing such a thing.
Something else she used to serve that made me gag—canned hominy. Not hominy grits (which I’ve never tasted, but knowing they’re made from hominy I never will). Big white gooey chunks of boiled white corn. I think that’s what hominy is. Why don’t they just put Dis-Gust-Ing on the label and be done with it?
Back to the favorites. Remember when Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee came out with pizza in a box? The dough mix, the sauce, the little tin of parmesan cheese and other ingredients were in there. Now that was a treat! Sometimes, if mom and dad were going out for the evening, that’s what we got to eat. Other times it was pot pies. The little ones in the tin pans. We loved those.
Every Thanksgiving my mother made a big turkey with all the trimmings. The leftovers would be served repeatedly until the thought of having to consume turkey in any form became nauseating. Usually, we would finish up the leftovers just in time for Christmas. Which is when my mother would make another big turkey with all the trimmings and the cycle would repeat.
Those huge holiday meals bear no resemblance to what I do now. Since I have a small family and we rarely have guests over the holidays, I have to hunt for the smallest turkey I can find. Usually a ‘Lil Butterball. I am required to make Stove Top Stuffing, because the one year I tried to make my own stuffing my son dubbed it “gross” and whined, “Why can’t we have the kind out the box?” I am allowed to make mashed potatoes with the real thing, but as I’ve said, I never learned how to make gravy so that comes out of a jar or a packet of mix.
We enjoy the holiday meal, such as it is, but my daughter’s favorite part isn’t the meal itself. It’s a day or two later when I combine all of the leftovers, the potatoes and gravy and stuffing and turkey, add noodles and make “stoup” out of it.
To this day, I can’t understand the point of forcing children to eat things they don’t like. From a nutritional standpoint, if your kid hates vegetables but loves fruit, there isn’t much of a difference. So if mine wanted apples instead of green beans, that was okay with me. And hell will freeze over before I put nuts or pecans in anything I make! My kids have never tasted liver or eggplant as far as I know. They were too traumatized by the stories I told about my own childhood experiences.
But still, all this hype about people who have issues with food? It’s ridiculous.
Isn’t it?
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