Spaghetti Night

When I was a kid, I was a selective eater. I made out fine at breakfast (peanut butter toast) and lunch (peanut butter sandwiches), but suppertime was always a bit of a minefield for me because there were so many main dishes and side dishes I didn't much like. And there were parents who didn't much like that I didn't eat what was on the table. So dinner time was often stressful. Thus, it was a huge relief when we had one of my two favorite dinners: tacos or spaghetti. Taco nights were rare--usually a birthday meal request from me or one of my siblings. But we had spaghetti more often. In addition to it being a food I loved, spaghetti night was also the one time we were allowed to drink pop with dinner. We shared a bottle of cherry, orange, or grape Golden Age soda. This gave spaghetti night an air of celebration. If I came home late from school after play practice and saw that the kitchen windows were steamed up, my heart lifted because I knew my mom's big aluminum spaghetti pot was boiling away inside. 

All these years later, spaghetti night still lifts my spirits. It doesn't matter if we're having it with homemade Bolognese sauce, salad, and garlic bread, or if I'm just putting a little jarred sauce atop buttered noodles; spaghetti always hits the spot with me. It's the meal we have when I'm tired, when I can't think of anything else to make, or when it's been a hard week. Or all of the above, like today. The steamy kitchen and the wafting smell of tomato sauce connect the present with the past. And to me that comforting plate full of noodles and sauce still feels like a little celebration--especially when it comes with a slice of leftover apple pie! I hope that each of you found a soft place to land for a few minutes this Sunday too.  

Heavenly Hash Cake

Although we only spent a couple of years in Muncie, Indiana, we picked up a lot of things in that little community that we've carried with us ever since. It was there I learned to knit. There I fell in love with Little Kiddles. There we learned about candy strings. And it was there my mom acquired her recipe for heavenly hash cake.  For those of you who have never had it, heavenly hash is a fudgy chocolate cake topped with a layer of marshmallow cream and then with creamy chocolate frosting. It quickly became a family favorite. It was almost always my sister's choice for her "good report card" treat. My mom made it for church picnics, for family reunions, and for the fancy coffee hours my dad used to host for his university students. When there was a pan of heavenly hash cake in our house, all was well. The heavenly hash cake recipe is one of the oldest in my recipe box, and I used to make it fairly often. But then, for some reason, I stopped making it. In fact, until this past week, the last time I made it may well have been for my middle child's 7th birthday. That same dear child just celebrated his 24th birthday. He came home for a visit a few days after his birthday, and the day before he arrived, I found myself pulling out the old recipe to make a belated birthday/4th of July heavenly hash cake.  As I was spreading the thick chocolately batter into the pan, the comforting, familiar smell sent me hurtling back through time and space to the kitchens of my childhood. The next day when the cake was finished and my boy was home, I took my first heavenly bite, and once again, all was well.

Meatloaf for Dinner?

As I already acknowledged in an earlier post, I was a picky eater as a kid.  The list of foods I didn't like was long, but at the very top of the list was MEATLOAF, a meal we had way too often.  I don't know if it was the minced onions (another food right near the top of the list) it contained or its texture that I disliked, but I just could not eat it.  My dad, a meatloaf lover, used to offer me a quarter to take a bite, and even though a quarter could buy a lot of candy in those days, I don't think I ever took him up on it.  I know many people consider meatloaf to be one of the ultimate comfort foods, but I just don't get it.  And as far as I'm concerned, the only thing worse than meatloaf is a meatloaf sandwich.  My children never even got the chance to turn up their noses at meatloaf because, of course, I never made it for them, and poor Steve, who actually likes meatloaf, hasn't had it in thirty years.  So imagine my surprise when I saw a recipe for Mexican Meatloaf on my favorite cooking blog earlier this week and couldn't get it out of my mind.  I kept re-opening the post, trying to decide if I could actually bring myself to make meatloaf.  I finally decided to go for it.  Right this very minute it's cooking away in my little Crockpot, and it's looking and smelling good!  Now, I'll admit a slow-cooker Mexican meatloaf is a pretty far cry from the classic meatloaf my mom used to make (which involved Quaker Oats and ketchup and the aforementioned minced onions), and I can't imagine I'll ever travel that far down the meatloaf path, but for a recovering picky eater, this is a major breakthrough!

P.S. Dad, when I get to heaven, you're going to owe me a quarter . . .

Cherry Pie

Every year when February rolls around, I get a craving for cherry pie.  The reason?  Thanks to the good old McGuffey Reader's inclusion of biographer Mason Locke Weems' anecdote about six-year-old George Washington damaging his father's cherry tree with his little hatchet and then owning up to his misdeed ("I cannot tell a lie, father, you know I cannot tell a lie!"), my mom associated cherries with George Washington and baked a cherry pie every February to celebrate his birthday. Whether the story is true or not makes no difference to me--what matters is that it led to an extra cherry pie each year, and cherry was my favorite kind of pie; in fact, it was my favorite dessert, period.  The only other time we had it was when I requested it as my "good report card" treat, which I did, regularly, but my three siblings all chose apple dumplings, so we ate apple dumplings a lot more often than cherry pie.  The kind of cherry pie I'm talking about is made with tart cherries, not with canned cherry pie filling.  And my mom's cherry pies always had a lattice top made with strips of pie crust cut with a little zig-zag pastry wheel.  Unfortunately, my fondness for cherry pie didn't rub off on any of my kids.  In fact, for most of their growing-up years, my kids weren't pie eaters at all.  So lots of Februaries came and went with no cherry pie for me (unless my mom happened to be visiting!).  I am happy to report, however, that all three of my kids like pie now.  And although my daughter's favorite pie is apple, she also likes cherry.  And she's home this weekend.  And it's President's Day Eve.  So tonight we are having cherry pie, by George!

Salad Dressing

In this day and age when you can find just about every kind of salad dressing you can imagine, in both regular and light versions, most people don't make salad dressing from scratch.  And I usually don't either; I don't even mix up Good Seasons Italian Dressing anymore.  But one of the oldest and most well-worn cards in my recipe box is for "Mom's Mayonnaise Salad Dressing."  Although I don't make it often, when I do I'm instantly transported across time and space to my mom's kitchen.  I'm not sure about this, but I think she got the recipe from her mom (who may have gotten it from her mom?).  And it's nothing fancy--just mayo, a little milk, a little sugar, a little vinegar, and some salt and pepper all whisked together.  My mom used to put it on a salad made of iceberg lettuce and sliced hard-boiled egg; she served it in her middle-size silver mixing bowl as a side dish to either Swiss steak or Beef-Carrots-Potatoes-and-Onions.  As a kid, I didn't like the salad or either one of those main dishes.  But over the years, I grew to love them all, and now when I need a little comfort food, these are the things I often turn to, especially the mayonnaise salad dressing.  When I made it recently, I used light mayo, instead of regular, and organic baby romaine instead of iceberg lettuce.  And I added some diced-up Cheddar cheese.  Sometimes, if I have them, I also add some fresh broccoli and chopped red bell pepper.  What I end up with isn't quite like the salad Mom used to make, but my version is only possible because of what I learned from her.  I think this holds true for so many of the things I've done and made throughout my life.  I'm hoping I've supplied my own children with what Mom gave me: basic recipes they can use to make a full and happy life.  They will, undoubtedly, make many additions and substitutions to what I've tried to hand down.  And as a result, their lives may well end up being quite different from the way I made mine, but what they create will be just right for them.

It's Just Broccoli

My youngest moved out of the dorm and into a college-owned townhouse at the beginning of this school year, and as a result has been eating in the dining hall less and cooking more.  I finally finished copying the recipes for her red binder (Recipes), so she has that with her.  But there are a lot of little things that aren't in there.  Sunday afternoon we were talking on the phone, and she asked how long you could keep broccoli in the fridge and how much she should cook for one person--she was worried she was eating too many carbs and not enough veggies.  After our conversation, she headed off to the little local grocery store in search of broccoli.  Around dinner time, I got a text saying, "so to cook broccoli, do you just put it in a pot of water?"  I texted back a few instructions, and she replied, "okay thanks hope i can make it like you."  I smiled to myself thinking, It's just broccoli.  A little while later I got back-to-back texts; the first one said, "it's good!" and then came the one that has stayed with me all week: "tasted like home :) ."  I came to realize that it wasn't "just broccoli"; it was my college-age daughter taking care of herself, eating her veggies, and carrying forward into her life-away-from-home something I never even realized I was passing along.  Broccoli is the one vegetable everybody in our family likes; I can't imagine how many florets I've cut and cooked over the years.  But to me, it was always just something to go along with the meal, something I fixed almost without thinking about it.  I never thought about it "tasting like home."  And maybe that's a good lesson for those of us in the process of letting go of our kids--they're going to be just fine; they have picked up and taken with them all the things they want and need most.

A Long Weekend

My mom's recent visit went just about the way I imagined it would, and it was lovely.  It felt like vacation with its slow pace, good food, good company, long walks, board games, and frequent laughter.  One problem with vacations is the letdown that often follows, and this weekend was no exception.  When Mom left Thursday night, she was accompanied by our kids who had made plans to visit their Pennsylvania cousins.  Somehow, I hadn't really anticipated the emptiness I would feel--I thought I'd finally gotten used to my kids' coming and going and the quiet house, but for some reason, the sudden absence of both kids at once hit my husband and me hard.  It was as if we'd both lost our footing and neither was able to steady the other.  Friday was an exasperating day--nothing went right from morning to night.  Saturday was stormy outside and in--we muddled through the day, but by evening our tempers were short, and we ended up having a stupid argument that at first appeared to be about other things but once we had cooled off and calmed down, we realized what was underneath it all: we both missed our kids and I missed my mom, and we didn't quite know what to do with ourselves.  Then Sunday dawned bright and clear, and we regained our equilibrium.  We slept late, watched a bit of Olympic tennis and the end of the women's road race, went to church, and then spent the afternoon cooking and relaxing and reading on the porch.  We had a layered Cobb salad for dinner (a dish that none of our kids would have liked but we loved), followed by a peach pie made with the local peaches I got at yesterday's farmers' market.  After supper we drove to the lake to watch the sunset. The peace and contentment that were missing Friday and Saturday are back.  And although I'll be happy to see our kids when they roll in around midnight, I'm grateful for this long weekend and for what it's taught me: to be thankful for the blessings we've had and for those that remain.

  

Smoothie Days

A good friend of Steve's gave us an Oster blender as a wedding gift.  We used it for many things over the years, including to puree hot broccoli soup, the steam from which blew the top off the blender, and we ended up with hot broccoli soup all over the kitchen, and I learned a messy but unforgettable lesson about blending hot foods.  Somewhere along the way, the first blender gave out and we replaced it with a second Oster blender.  The new blender got a lot of use at first, but then I got a food processor and started using it for most of my blending needs.  The good old blender spent most of its time in the cupboard, only making an appearance for the occasional milkshake.  But then my middle child fell in love with fruit smoothies.  They were expensive to buy, so I bought him the Klutz Smoothies book as a birthday gift one year, and all of a sudden, the blender was back in demand.  The secret of the smoothie, according to the Klutz book, was frozen bananas.  So for years, we had little containers of frozen banana slices in our freezer (until we discovered fresh bananas work just fine as long as the other fruit you use is frozen) and the blender was whirling up a lot of smoothies.  We tried several of the Klutz recipes over the years but eventually adapted and perfected our own version, which we like better than the ones we buy at restaurants.  My smoothie-loving son is off on his own now, still blending fruit and juice with his Magic Bullet, but my daughter has become a smoothie lover, too.  So during the summer months, the humble old Oster blender shares counter space with the snazzy new food processor and gets an almost daily workout turning frozen strawberries, frozen peaches, frozen blueberries, bananas, and orange juice into thick fruit smoothies.   I know that a couple of years from now when my daughter is off on her own, every time I see that good old Oster blender sitting patiently in the cupboard, it'll make me miss my kids and the smoothie days.  I might even get a little teary-eyed, or maybe I'll just pull it out and blend up my own smoothie!

Picky Eaters

I'll admit it: I was a picky eater as a kid.  So when Steve and I got married, I loved being in charge of the meal planning—finally, there was something I liked for dinner every single night!  During those first few years of marriage, I collected a lot of new recipes and soon my wooden recipe box was filled with dishes my husband and I both loved.  Then we had kids.  Even though it’s never been proven (as far as I know), I suspect there’s a picky-eating gene, and I passed it along to all three of my kids.  The tricky thing was, they were each picky in their own way.  So this made meal-planning challenging over the years.  Now some of you non-picky eaters are probably thinking if I’d just been firmer with my kids, they wouldn’t have been so picky.  Well, I am here to tell you I tried EVERYTHING over the years.  The one thing I refused to do, however, was to make mealtime a battleground.  Having a pleasant dinner together was more important to me than winning the war over food.  So maybe you’re right, perhaps I was too accommodating, and I suppose I was also more than a little bit sympathetic.  I knew how miserable meals could be when you didn’t like meatloaf or country pie or liver and onions or all the other foods I pushed around on my plate over the years.  So when our kids were growing up, we settled into a pretty predictable pattern of meals.  It wasn’t that we never had meals one or more of the kids didn’t like, but recipes everyone liked ended up in the rotation a lot more often than dishes that only two people liked.  So for a lot of years, I rarely pulled the recipes for some of those early favorites out of the recipe box.  In fact, I forgot about a lot of them.  But then it happened—one by one, bit by bit, my kids’ palates started to grow up.  And suddenly, cooking became a lot more fun again.  This summer in addition to experimenting with new recipes, I've been cooking up some of the old ones.  This week, I’m two for two.  On Father’s Day, I made Lammel Supreme, a chicken dish that dates back to our college days. And last night we had Garden-Style Pizza (zucchini, carrots, and mushrooms on an oatmeal crust), a recipe I copied down from a magazine during the first days of married life.  Both were hits with the kids who were home for dinner, and both brought back fond food memories for my husband and me. Although the kids still have their favorite (and least favorite) meals, they are willing to try just about anything now, something I never would have imagined ten years ago! (Let me know if you want a recipe . . . )

Kayaking, Prince Edward Island, and Pizza with Black Olives

I think one of the most unnerving things about this stage of my life is that I don't quite know who I am anymore.  When you become a parent, you do what’s best for the family, which often means putting your kids’ needs ahead your own.  You tend to do what they like to do, go where they like to go, and fix what they like to eat. This all worked out pretty well for me over the years for several reasons.  First, it made life easier.  Second, if my kids were happy, I was happy.  And third, one of the great things about having kids is that they end up leading you in all kinds of directions you never would have gone in on your own.  However, as I've discovered recently, somewhere along the way while I was doing things with and for my kids, I kind of lost track of myself.  And now without their plans and schedules and preferences guiding me, I feel a little disoriented.  I don’t know what I want to do or where I want to go or even what topping to order on my pizza.  But I'm thinking it's about time to start finding out . . . .

  

Tea, Toast, and Razor Scooters

Sixth grade was a tough year for my son—too much tedious homework and too little joy.  I told my dad about his struggle on the phone part way through the school year, and he suggested that we offer him a reward for making it through a tough situation.  Any time he had an overwhelming amount of homework on a school night, he was supposed to mark it on the calendar, and at the end of the school year, he could trade in all of his frustration for a reward: something big, my dad said, something worth working for.   We decided on a Razor scooter, something my son had been wanting that we couldn’t afford.  There was one catch: no complaining.  Many nights that year, my son stomped down the stairs, made an angry “x” on the calendar and stomped back up, but overall, life was more peaceful.  And now, instead of remembering a bad year in school, he remembers a clever, loving grandpa.  I needed some help solving that problem, but most of the other little troubles of childhood, I could fix with tea and toast or a colorful Band-aid or a night of pizza and videos.  One of the hard things about being the parent of adult children is that now when they are sad or sick or lonely or frustrated or heartbroken, I can’t fix things—the troubles are too big or the pain too deep.  I can pray for them and encourage them.  I can listen and offer advice.  But mostly they have to get better or figure things out on their own. I realized, though, when telling this story, that when my dad found a way to help my son through his sixth grade year, he ended up helping me, too.  So maybe my days of fixing things for my kids aren't completely over either.

Sunday Dinners

When I rolled out of bed on the Sunday mornings of my childhood, I’d find my mom in the kitchen browning the meat or chopping the vegetables or making the salad for Sunday Dinner. Before we left for Sunday school, she had Swiss steak or pork roast or beef-carrots-potatoes-and-onions in the oven or on the stove or in the electric skillet. As soon as we got home from church, she would put on an apron and whip into action, and by 1:00, we’d be sitting down to a big meal. When my own kids were young, we often went to my husband’s parents’ house for Sunday Dinner. At their house, dinner was the evening meal, a big dinner that my mother-in-law had spent much of her afternoon preparing. After my husband's dad died, we started having Sunday dinner here, but it wasn’t quite the event it had been when my mom or my mother-in-law was doing the cooking—it was just another dinner, not Sunday Dinner. Then for a little while when our kids were in high school, two of my friends and I took turns hosting Sunday Dinner for all three families, but when our kids started leaving for college, that came to an end. In the last year or so, a new Sunday Dinner tradition has been quietly taking root in our family. I think it started during football season when Ben, the child who lives nearby, would come over after church to watch football and do his laundry. For years while the kids were growing up, Friday night was pizza night, but when we stopped having kids at home, we stopped ordering pizza on Friday nights. Yet we still had a fondness for pizza, so on one of those Sunday afternoons, we decided to get pizza and bread sticks during the second game. Then a couple of weeks later, we remembered how good that pizza had tasted, and I remembered how nice it was to sit and watch football instead of making dinner, so we decided to order pizza again, this time with chicken wings. Now, more often than not, we eat pizza for Sunday Dinner. And I’ve decided to stop feeling guilty that I don’t have dinner in the oven when I leave for church or that I don’t spend all of Sunday afternoon cooking a big meal. I’ve finally realized that Sunday Dinner isn’t about the food, it’s about the memories—and for us, for now, pizza works just as well as pork roast.

Grocery Store Blues

Odd as it might sound, one of the places that made me feel sad when each of my kids first left for college was the grocery store.  I suppose it was the connection between how much time I had spent over the years feeding each of those full-grown kids and the realization that now I wouldn’t be doing it anymore that led to the bewildering sense of loss I felt as I pushed my cart through the store.  And it didn’t get any easier with experience—each child’s absence brought on the same rush of emotion.  I would see the Kaiser rolls in the bakery that my oldest child took in his lunch for years, or I’d push my cart past the Gatorade display and think of the gallons I’d bought for my middle child, or I’d see the blue boxes of Oatmeal Squares that I’d bought every week for years for my youngest, and before I knew it, my eyes would be misting up.  This went on aisle after aisle, food after food: bags of Empire apples, Goldfish crackers, Chips Deluxe Rainbow cookies, s’more granola bars, and key lime yogurt.  And then I’d start remembering all the years of going grocery shopping with my kids, especially the younger two who used to munch their way through the aisles, starting with pizza from the Carry-Out Café and ending with donuts from the bakery. So by the time I got to the dairy aisle, I'd be sniffling a little and even wiping away a tear or two, as kindly fellow shoppers gave me curious but sympathetic looks.  Eventually, I got used to a shorter grocery list, and now I can get through a shopping trip with nary a tear!  But I have to admit, there’s a bounce in my step when one of my kids is coming home, and I get to stock up on some of their favorite foods again.

Recipes

I know you can now find just about any recipe you want on the internet; as a matter of fact, I get plenty of recipes there myself. So most of my newer recipes are printed from websites or emails and stored neatly in a three-ring binder.  But the recipes I use the most are the ones stuffed into the recipe box I got when we were first married.  My oldest recipes are written on the cards that came with the box, and I’ve been pulling them out and making them for nearly thirty years.  Other recipes are written on plain white index cards in my mom’s neat printing and my mother-in-law’s distinctive cursive.  I also have recipes from my sister and brother, from my sisters-in-law, from aunts and uncles, and from old friends.  Many are named for the person I got the recipe from: Martha's Magnificent Mustard, Sal's Hot Chicken Salad, Cathy's Spinach Balls.  I love my recipe box both for the recipes and the history it holds.  Two Christmases ago, I bought three red recipe binders for my soon-to-be-moving-out-on-their-own kids.  One of my fondest memories of that Christmas season was listening to the three of them going through my box of recipes, choosing the ones they wanted in their binders.  My plan was to copy the recipes down in their books over the winter months.  It ended up being a much bigger job than I had anticipated.  First of all, there are over a hundred recipes among the three lists.  Second, I soon realized that for many of the recipes, I couldn’t just write down ingredients and directions, I also needed to include explanations, like how to whisk flour into butter then slowly add the milk to make Alfredo sauce.  So two years later, the binders are still far from finished.  However, a few weeks before my son made his post-college move to Rochester last fall, I put his binder on the fast track and got it done. As it turns out, I don’t think he’s used it once yet in his new adult life—he works long hours and is too tired and hungry by the time he gets home to cook anything from scratch.  But I believe, someday, he will.  And so will the other two (if I ever finish their books!). And when they do, I hope they will see for themselves how important it is to eat breakfast and dinner and Christmas cookies with the people you love and how favorite recipes connect the past and the future.