Daily Blague

If I try cooking myself, I'm afraid my guests will give up eating. Or they might have to settle with grocery sausages and fried eggs.

Culinary (dis)courses aside, thank you for such a wonderful post. Of course, I am terribly and fundamentally old-fashioned, but you just significantly eased my stubborn aversion to ending pieces with fragments. Delightful!

Happy New Year!

Mrs. Stevens, our elderly babysitter who couldn't remember to turn off her blinker after making her turns (Dink-AH, dink-AH, dink-AH), also couldn't cook, and when my mother left the "safe" menu for her to prepare, Spanish rice and cube steak, she probably coudn't imagine how such staples could be mangled in the kitchen. The cube steaks turned up at the edges like the soles of old shoes, and I'll never forget the sound of the spatula pressing down hard on those poor meat patties to make them so: 'sssssssss.

There's certainly a nostaliga for the old foods. Mostly it makes me glad we're no longer in the dark ages of eating in this country. Now, if architectural taste and sophistication could only catch up with the culinary, we might be able to do away with McMansions with their wastefully draughty entry halls, cold and cavernous cathedral-ceiling living rooms, the ubiquitous granite counters in poorly designed "designer" kitchens, Corvette-inspired cooking stations to stroke the egos of the men who pay for these follies, and an endless span of walls without bookshelves.

Here's to hastening the end of the Lancer's and Mateus era of suburban architecture.

I so enjoyed the reminiscence about Barbara. I do remember vividly the famous night in Houston, in the heat of summer, when she 'experimented' on us with beef stroganoff....she was one of a kind.

We were out to dinner with friends last night and over cocktails discussing fish and Fridays and all of us, all Catholics, had stories about the horrors of Friday nights, incl Mrs. Paul's fish sticks, badly cooked spaghetti.... in my house it was exacerbated by the fact my parents were always going out on weekends and I was left to heat the food up for my sister and me.

What I do also remember is that we had no bread ever at the table, and when we had it, only at breakfast, it was either English muffins or brown. My Mother loathed even the thought of white bread, and to this day I won't touch it.

Happily for me, my sister and I were made to eat everything so I could, as I got older, make judgments about what I liked and didn't, but have found that my taste buds are changing with age. I like more bitter foods, am not as crazy about sweets.....but fish is something I like only in passing, thanks to that old Catholic prohibiton that made Friday nights such a chore. Imagine my surprise when in Nicaragua for my First Communion to discover meat being eaten on Fridays!! The prohibition never extended to Central or South America where there were refrigeration issues. That made those damn fish sticks even tougher to swallow......

I, too, remember a childhood of meatless Fridays, when dinner was often tuna noodle casserole: egg noodles, mixed with canned cream of mushroom soup, canned tuna and canned peas, topped with something (bread crumbs? crumbled cornflakes?) and baked in the oven until heated through. One of my brothers visited recently and we were reminiscing about our grandmother's cooking, particularly her vegetable soup with dumplings and home-made lefse (the Scandinavian--or at least American-Scandinavian--version of the tortilla, made from left-over mashed potatoes, which we slathered in butter, sprinkled liberally with heaping spoonfuls of sugar and then rolled into a fat cigar shape for easy eating; the store-bought variety, regularly available in certain parts of the midwest, isn't nearly so good), and our Bohemian (as in ethnicity, rather than life-style) great-grandmother's prune-filled kolaches. One of my regrets in life is that I never had either my grandmother or great-grandmother teach me how to prepare these old family recipes; to my knowledge, the recipes aren't written down anywhere (although my sister, a regular reader of the DB but someone who never comments, may finally decide to write to correct my error in this regard). While I enjoy cooking, I have yet to master the art of concocting something edible without detailed, written instructions and, even then, my kitchen has been the scene of more than one culinary mishap. Yet I soldier on, usually experimenting on friends but always keeping a frozen pizza on hand, just in case.

Dear RJ,

The things we remember. Thank you for remembering when we met on the Net and making it so meaningful. I met Bitch Ph.D in the flesh at the MLA meeting and she told me I was part of her original experience of the Net when I led a group of people to read _Clarissa_ in real time.

We went to the Kennedy Center last night and I described the experience and produced a debate on _The Light in the Piazza_ you may like. Just go to today's blog: "There they are!"

Happy New Year and I wish you and Kathleen many many many more ...

Ellen

PS. On second thought Bush was pretending to be asleep. It was a posture of arrogance.

I vividly remember "anything" croquettes (usually chicken) and still have a fondness for creamed food encased in a crisp shell. Campbell's tomato soup and tuna on rye toast, BLT's and cream cheese and jelly sandwiches. English pizza (Thomas's English Muffins, a good jarred tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese (we lived near an Italian neighborehood and so knew about fresh mozzarella) and a dusting of the, then exotic, cayenne pepper - all assembled and grilled in the broiler) - was a regular as soon as we were old enough to make it without burning down the house.

My mother was an excellent cook, and it was only after we were all grown and on our own that we found out how much she loathed cooking, cleaning, running a home and raising children. She frankly admitted that we only grew on her when we were old enough to hold coherent conversations. She said she was raised for this life and so did it well, but were she to be born today, she would be a single career woman and love it.

My father was an excellent chef and baker, as was my maternal grandfather, so cooking was encouraged among the men in the family, as long as it was of the "wow" variety and not everyday fare; that was women's work. I cook happliy to this day.