Flavors From My Childhood: Part 2

I now continue with Flavors from my Childhood, focusing on dishes from the mother. The mother has never been that interested in the culinary arts. She’ll tell you she hates cooking; however, she probably hated my attitude when my blood sugar would fall even more. The mother has a more traditional approach to cooking.

1. Tuna Casserole: This dish is a family favorite. Apparently my father hated this dish when he and my mother were together, but all the children loved it. This used to be my favorite mother-dish, but my preferences have gone the way of my father’s. This concoction consists of egg noodles, Velveeta, milk, canned tuna, and peas. When I ate this, I also liked to add hot pepper juice and lots of black pepper. May be the reason I liked it so much was that I never actually tasted it; I just liked the taste of pepper juice and black pepper. May be it is my disdain for milk and Velveeta, but I lost my taste for tuna casserole. It remains a favorite of my brothers.

2. Chicken and Dumplings: During the height of my tuna casserole craze, my older brother’s favorite dish was chicken and dumplings. This would probably rank among my current favorites, not just for the taste, but because I now have some idea of the labor that goes into it. Pressure cook one chicken (personally, I’d roast it), strip the meat off the bones, add meat, chicken stock, some other stuff, and uncooked biscuit dough, and voila. Dinnertime became tense when this dish was prepared. We were like ravenous soviet youths spying on each other, making sure that none of us was fishing for dumplings as we filled our bowls. Fishing was a huge faux pas in my mother’s house. Both she and my stepfather tended to prepare dishes that begged for fishing. Perhaps they were trying to teach us some lesson by putting the children in these awkward positions. We’d all sit down to the table and eye each other’s bowls, counting the number of dumplings to ourselves. About the labor: I roast chickens from time to time to make my own soup or chicken stock. I can tell you that a chicken retains its heat for a long time after cooking. You can let it sit a half hour and the thighs and breast will still threaten to burn off your fingerprints. Now, there is no way that my mother, an enemy of the kitchen, was going to spend any unnecessary time cooking, so I know that she did not let that bird cool before stripping it. I can’t help but think that she must harbor some resentment toward us for always wanting such a painful dish.

3. Breakfast: A favorite dinnertime mother-dish was breakfast. Who says that you can’t have the fattiest, tastiest meal at night? Biscuits and sausage gravy (the best part of which was being allowed to pop open the tube containing the biscuits), fried potatoes, chicken fried steak, eggs, etc., were common dinner fare. Oats and cream of wheat were personal favorites (see blog on oats below). It sounds so wrong, but it tasted so right. To this day I will still eat oats for dinner with a slice of slice of toast to scoop up the first few bites from the bowl.

4. Pot Roast: Again, here is a dish that remains a family favorite. I admit, there was a time when I did enjoy this dish, but it was not so much for the piece of meat that had been pressure cooked to hell as it was for the accoutrements: carrots and onions boiled in the beef water. I savored those grayish orange carrot spears and slurped up the translucent onion slivers as though they were from the kitchen of a 3-star Michelin restaurant. Gravy of a brown variety usually was used to drown this dish and reconstitute the beef.

5. Blueberry Cheesecake: A graham cracker crust, canned blueberries, and some Philadelphia cream cheese somehow conspired with my mother to create this dessert. Yet another crowd-pleaser.

6. Brownies and Blueberry Muffins: These are the best things my mother didn’t cook for me. She would leave a fraction of the batter uncooked for me because I preferred my brownies and muffins extra rare. I’d get the mixing bowl and beaters generously caked with tasty, gooey, doughiness. Who says the middle child is the most neglected?!

Meals at the mother-table were typically served with water or iced tea so sweet, you gulped it down as quickly as possible for fear that it might dissolve your teeth.