Monday, February 8, 2010

Food, Glorious Food

I have enjoyed cooking all of my adult life. Some of the credit goes to Paul – he is so much fun to cook for because he is such an adventurous and appreciative eater.  However most of the credit goes to my Mom – the undisputed Queen of the Kitchen and the Doyenne of Do-It-Ahead.  She started me out with basic rules like “Don’t clean up as you go along,” “Good food is more important to a party than good housekeeping,” and “Cooking barefoot is comfortable in the city and obligatory at the beach.”  The last rule has some interesting consequences when live crabs, that you plan to steam for dinner, escape from their cooler and skitter around the kitchen, snapping at toes and ankles.

Mom taught me creativity in food and meal planning.  She set a great example with our family Christmas celebrations, planning a Mexican Christmas one year, a Chinese dinner the next year and a Jewish Christmas after that.  She also thought it was okay for kids to eat pie for breakfast or even vegetable soup or hot dogs.  That was a relief to those of us who don’t like traditional breakfast foods although she did set some limits – the pie had to have fruit in it and the hot dogs couldn’t have chili or onions on them.

She outdid herself in devising the culinary coup de grace of our family Sunday night suppers.  We often ate picnic style, seated around a tablecloth on the floor in front of the fireplace.  On an ordinary Sunday, we might have hamburger spread on toast.  (Mom was the original “hamburger helper.”)  To crank it up a notch, we would have honey glazed Spam and baked beans or Dad’s famous spit barbequed whole baloney.   For a really special Sunday, Dad would fire up the hibachi and Mom would offer treats for us to grill like Vienna sausages, smoked oysters and water chestnuts wrapped in bacon.  As Dad used to say, “You can’t beat that with a stick,”

No tale of Mom’s culinary expertise would be complete without a recap of the dishes that made her reputation.  Her German potato salad has been known to reduce grown men to quivering pools of saliva.  My college friends still speak wistfully of the Tunnel of Fudge cakes she sent up to the sorority house.  Items like her ham salad provided both entertainment and nourishment.  It was great fun to shove ham chunks, whole hard boiled eggs and pickles into the metal jaws of her big meat grinder, turn the crank and watch while, magically, ham salad oozed out the other end.  All it needed was a few blops of the ubiquitous and mysterious 50’s creation, Miracle Whip, and “Voila!” –the best ham salad in the world. 

My recipe file is full of Mom’s wonderful and easy recipes.  They range from the sublime like chicken cheese buns, barbecued beef brisket, devilled clams, and pumpkin cake to the ridiculous like Hot Dog Soup and cracker pie.  Alas, the grandkids have never experienced her French toast, a recipe that could have created a veritable stampede to cardiologists’ offices across the country, had it been widely publicized.  She took triangles of soft, white bread (crusts cut off, of course), dipped them in an egg and milk mixture and fried them in about 2 inches of hot oil until they were brown and crisp on the outside.  We sprinkled them with sugar and crunched our way through breakfast, forever spoiled for limp, spongy, insipid restaurant French toast.  Those were the good old days before cholesterol and plaque had been invented.
Mom encouraged in me (and everyone in the family, kids, grandkids, in-laws and out-laws) a love of good food and the fun of enjoying it together.  We learned a lot from her and we keep on learning. However, my sister never can get Mom to answer one food question that’s been bothering her for years: “Who the hell was ‘Johnny Marzetti’ and why didn’t she call her hamburger and macaroni casserole ‘Dirt and Worms’ like all the other kids’ moms?”

P.S. My mom teaches Water Aerobics, edits her community newspaper, plays bridge, travels and cooks for her friends in Durham, North Carolina. She can still wrestle a Thanksgiving turkey to the ground.

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