Did you ever notice how hard it is to eat healthy when you’re away from home? We’re entering a period of long absences from home for a myriad of reasons and during our first few days, I find I am sorely missing my fridge’s crisper full of vegetables. The older I get, the more I understand how eating lots of veggies (and fruits) in their most natural state makes my whole body feel better. So french fries and onion rings don’t count. And neither does ketchup, which has been touted as a vegetable to make Americans feel better about the poor state of school cafeteria offerings.
I don’t remember my mom badgering us about eating our veggies – the veggies were just…there. All the time. Fresh lettuce salads in the summer, tomatoes all day long as soon as they started ripening on the vine, cucumber sandwiches – so much organic produce before organic produce was cool. And almost every day of the year, there was always Mom’s Vegetable Soup.
Maybe it wasn’t every day. Sometimes there was borscht (the best on the planet) or chicken soup with homemade noodles. But soup was a staple in our house at lunchtime, an appetizer or a meal in itself. I never got tired of Mom’s vegetable soup or of dipping her homemade buns in the broth and slurping it all up. Over the years Mom probably tweaked her recipe to change it up a bit – she started adding chili powder at some point. (We ate a lot of chili, too, so Mom must have liked it, as it is a cook’s prerogative to mostly cook what they themselves want to eat.)
Mom didn’t leave behind recipes, per se, but she left behind tastes, as in: This tastes just like Mom’s. I still haven’t completely figured out her perogies or her cabbage rolls, but I think I’ve come pretty close with her vegetable soup. I used to think soup was too mysterious to make from scratch and mostly stuck to opening cans of Campbell’s tomato or mushroom soup, whisking in some milk and calling it lunch. But eventually that just didn’t cut it anymore. And one day, after falling in love with The Mom 100 Cookbook, I decided to try the vegetable soup recipe, and after making my own Mom-inspired tweaks, I now have my own recipe.
And so I’m looking forward to going home and pulling out those simplest of ingredients – onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, some stock and some salt and pepper – oh, and a can of tomato soup for that tomatoey-goodness – and feeding my body and soul. I think of Mom every time – she was also no-nonsense and down-to-earth just like her soup. And it makes me happy that such comfort and goodness can be found in a simple bowl of homemade soup.
Tell me everything you know about Jell-O. This was the prompt I came across this week in a writing book.
I hadn’t thought about Jell-O that much until a couple months ago when my nieces came here for a day during that surprise extra week they had off after Christmas. We talked about school and Covid and teachers and masks and hot lunches and that’s when I found out that THEY NEVER GOT JELL-O ANYMORE. With whipped cream. And that this was one of the great disappointments they’ve had to bear during this pandemic. (I’m not really sure why but I took their word for it.) Since they would be at my house for a few hours, I suggested we make some Jell-O. If we started right then, it would be ready for afternoon snack.
Of course, I had some packages of Jell-O around because – Hello? – I was raised by my mom who became a housewife in the fifties. That’s when the necessary refrigeration to make Jell-O became de rigeur. As we boiled some water, I told the girls that when I was their age, I helped my mom make Jell-O every Saturday night for Sunday dinner’s dessert. Nothing about the process has changed: empty one package of Jell-O (or jelly powder if you eschew the name brand) into one cup of very hot water – measured with a Pyrex measuring cup, of course – and stir until dissolved. Then add one cup of very cold water and stir again. Mostly I “helped” because Mom would always pour me a teensy glass of the hot Jell-O water before she put the rest into a cut glass bowl to set in the fridge. It was like a warm liquid lollipop. Usually it was fake strawberry flavor, sometimes it was fake lime or fake orange. I don’t think it was ever fake grape.
Nothing could be simpler. Mom once got frustrated with someone “who couldn’t even make Jell-O!” – sort of the way you would get mad at someone who couldn’t boil water. However, everything seemed easy for Mom in the kitchen – she was such a good cook. But that didn’t exclude putting Jell-O on the menu every weekend.
It also did not mean that every time I saw Jell-O in the Co-op Cafeteria, I didn’t want some. The whipped cream they put on it was part of the allure – that and those sexy cafeteria sherbet glasses. (You can buy six dozen of those for $237.00 online – but that doesn’t include shipping.) I didn’t have any fancy bowls, but I did have some leftover whipping cream in the fridge from Christmas, so I whipped it up for the girls when the Jell-O was ready. It was a pretty easy thing to do for them.
I guess that is part of the charm of Jell-O – it is easy. But another part is that you have to wait for it. (Unless you just want to drink hot Jell-O water.) When my boys had their wisdom teeth out, I made sure that I made Jell-O before we left for the dentist’s office. Jell-O marked both the low bar and the high bar of my career as a mom. Easy to do, but you had to remember to do it.
Got any Jell-O memories? There’s always room for Jell-O – and memories.
It’s that time of year again – that sad time when I’m getting close to the bottom of the tomato bowl. OF COURSE, I’m not talking about imported/Costco/mealy/poor-substitute tomatoes. It’s mid-October and the last of my home grown tomatoes are about to ripen – and be eaten – with relish (the verb not the noun.)
I come from a family of tomato eaters and I married into a family of the same. You’d think we were Italians, the way we all cultivate and nurture our own tomato plots. Rick and I have moved several times and garden-spot or not, I have always found a place to plant my own personal crop of Beefsteaks, Tiny Tims and the like – even if it was in the front yard instead of the usual petunias. Overgrown zucchini and a glut of green beans are often abandoned on doorsteps of unsuspecting friends and relatives. But no one really likes sharing their tomatoes. Not even me.
I know that my mother canned plenty of ripe tomatoes for all the soups and stews we would inhale all winter long. But the gold standard of tomato use in our family was The Tomato Sandwich. There was no need to muck about with pumpernickel or Grey Poupon or even cheese. All that was necessary was white bread, Kraft Miracle Whip, salt and pepper and a generously sliced, ripe red tomato. The result was two triangles of ambrosial goodness. It was hard to get tired of such sustenance when we were in tomato season. And even though it got a little soggy, the tomato sandwich was still a favorite sandwich to find in my lunchbox at school.
During these last tomato days, Rick and I will indulge on the weekends with tomatoes on our morning toast. I keep it regular with good old mayonnaise and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Rick prefers to eat his toast and tomatoes – as his whole family does – with honey. And although I have been woo’d to taste and see the Donily side of many dishes, I can’t seem to cross the mayo to honey barrier. Tomato time is too short to take such a gamble.
Nowadays, if I have an overabundance of tomatoes, I throw them in the freezer whole for future butter chickens or hamburger soups. I take advantage of the green tomatoes and will bread them like they are chicken legs and fry them up at least once a season. And every supper is graced with a sliced tomato on the side in high season. Sometimes, we’ll fry up the bacon for some BLTs. But nothing – for me – will compare to the plain old humble tomato sandwich.
In our home, whenever we had hard-boiled eggs, the kids always thought that it was just hilarious and maybe a little gross that I put mustard on mine. Never mind the fact that I always put mustard in egg salad sandwich filling or in devilled eggs. I suppose in that case the joke is on them if they choose to stay out of the kitchen during meal preparation. But to me, mustard and hard-boiled eggs go together just like strawberries and cream or Ritz Bits (cheese-filled) and Nutella. (Try it. I’m not wrong.)
I have a pretty good idea how the mustard first got on my eggs in the first place: it has to do with Easter. Coming from a Ukrainian and Polish household, it was tradition on Easter Sunday morning to wake up to a breakfast of paska (egg bread), kobasa (good old garlic sausage) and, of course, hard-boiled eggs. All these tasty things had survived a trip to and from the church in a basket on Holy Saturday, where it had been blessed for our breakfast the next day. And nestled among the pussy willows nearly hidden from view would be an unobtrusive jar of mustard. Just a little bit, recently removed from an indelicate yellow French’s jar.
Since it was breakfast and you didn’t want to overdo it for Easter dinner after church, a small plate was in order. The blob of mustard at the side was originally intended for the kobasa, I think. But with the bread, meat and egg placed so closely together on a saucer, the inevitable would happen: the egg, so round and slippery, would get a mustard bath. At any rate, since we had fasted the two days before (another tradition, but more spiritual than mustard on eggs), it didn’t really matter what was on those eggs before you scarfed them down. The wonderful thing was that it was really good. So good that, Easter or not, I still put some French’s on my hard-boiled eggs.
This Easter breakfast is more of a tradition to me than the ham or turkey afterwards or even those one pound bunnies lurking around the house just begging for their ears to get gnawed off. This became painfully aware to me the first time that I had Easter away from home. At sixteen, I participated in a school trip to California and Mexico. In my excitement, I only gave fleeting thought to the fact I’d be away from home for the holiday. But once on the bus, I realized that my Easter was not going to be what it usually was. Some friends thought I was weird when I ordered oyster soup on Good Friday, but my conscience kept me from eating meat that day, knowing the rest of my family wasn’t. We arrived early enough at our destination that same day for my teacher-chaperone to find me a church service, especially since our travel plans would preclude me attending on Sunday. But I hadn’t solved my Easter breakfast dilemma yet. Did hotels in San Francisco carry kobasa on their menu?
When I went to the dining area for a continental breakfast that Easter morning, I had made up my mind to just imagine my toast was paska and be happy with that. But I never had to do that. You see, in our small high school, we weren’t able to fill up our tour bus with enough students so our “Myrnam to Mexico” club opened up the rest of the bus to any senior citizens who wanted to accompany us. And that morning, when I greeted two of the Ukrainian ladies with the traditional Easter greeting, “Christ is Risen!”, they invited me to join them for their breakfast of paska and kobasa. Obviously, they had planned ahead and smuggled the stuff along in their suitcase. So, together that morning we enjoyed a transcontinental breakfast.
There was no mustard on eggs that day, but hey, half a tradition can be better than nothing. And that was a great deal of comfort on my first Easter Sunday away from home.
One thing I have been using a lot more during the pandemic is a nice little library app called Libby. It’s like a one-stop shop for all my digital library needs – especially audiobooks. Sometimes when I just want to listen to something while I walk or cook or exercise, I check out what’s available right now – kind of like Russian library roulette. And so, I found myself listening to Charlotte’s Web. The bonus: it was read by the author E. B. White himself.
I came to this classic book kind of late, not reading it until I was in my thirties. I was enchanted then and was enchanted again as I listened last week to a story about a couple of unlikely best friends: a pig and a spider. The setting however, was not unfamiliar to me: a barn with lots of other residents. In the story there are cows, geese, even a rat who goes through his own story arc. And I reminisced a little about when I had a barn to visit like Fern, the girl who saved Wilbur the pig from an early demise.
One of my favorite memories about living on the farm, however, isn’t about me visiting the animals in the barn but the other way around. In the early spring, when a litter of baby pigs arrived but the temperature dipped too low for their safety, my Dad or my brothers would bring a cardboard box of piggies into the house for the night. The box would be placed next to the wall register in my bedroom off the kitchen and I was lulled to sleep by the gentle squeaks of warm baby piggies. (I would pay cash money for a sleep app that featured a “warm newborn piglets in a cardboard box” soundtrack.)
I’m so thankful for having grown up on the farm. Although it was never my ambition to keep being a farm girl, I am glad that I know where my bread and butter actually do come from. I’m re-reading another favorite right now –Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver – about her family’s year-long chronicle with eating a diet of only locally sourced foods, much of which was grown on their own farm. I decided to read this book slowly, enjoying the corresponding chapters with each ensuing month. It starts in March. Kingsolver, an wonderful writer, but also a botanist and a vigilante gardener outlines in the introduction how very far removed most people are from the source of their food. Even a biologist friend, hearing Kingsolver recap over the phone the goings-on in her garden was surprised to hear that the potatoes were “up”: she thought that potatoes only had bottoms, no tops.
Most of us who grow up on the farm know that you name your pets with caution, understanding the caveat that having a name doesn’t mean they will escape their eventual fate like Wilbur the Pig does. (And zero of us knows a spider who managed it.) But there’s something very gratifying about knowing where your Easter ham comes from or the colored eggs (hint: not a bunny) or the asparagus that Kingsolver rhapsodizes about in her March chapter.
Thank goodness for farmers and writers who remind us of these simple life-giving things.
So maybe my garden is not the hopeless case I thought it was going to be when I wrote about it a few weeks ago.
Okay, there’s still a bald patch where the cucumbers committed vegecide, but I could just pretend that some lettuce was growing there and we already ate it. And the beans are promising to make a nice side dish for supper next week.
There’s even some unearned glory, as we never planted this:
But the real redemption that happened is this:
REAL tomatoes. In fact, I still had some fake cherry tomatoes from my last Costco shopping spree and they were downright embarrassed to share the counter with such beauties. They’re not going to show their faces around here for awhile.
Tomatoes aside, this time of year has me hankering for all the other garden offerings, even some over large zucchini squash, as the seedsI planted stood me up.
In that spirit, here’s a throwback homage (from my old column, with a few updates) to that oh-so-versatile veggie that holds up the end of the alphabet:
Every year a collective forgetfulness falls over all true vegetable gardeners. Inevitably, as they pass by the seed racks in the grocery stores, they pick up an extra package of zucchini seeds. Or perhaps it happened during the previous fall when they decided to dry an extra dozen or so. And then the funniest thing happens come planting time: they plant all of them! Or so it seems. Zucchini season hits and the squash are exploding off the vines faster than acne on a teenager.
If you don’t have a garden, you aren’t exempt from the onslaught. The sweet Ukrainian lady next door who, in the summertime, you only glimpse bobbing and weaving between her giant beanstalks and rows of oak-like corn, sneaks over in the early morning and deposits 2 or 3 zucchini in a Tom-Boy bag on your doorstep. Perhaps they are concealed under a few onions, some new potatoes and two or three cukes, but all the same they’re there. And you know it’s her because you’ve seen her stash of vintage plastic. But unlike the proverbial baby in the basket, she has left no instructions of what to do with them. She was just happy to have a break from making another batch of pineapple-zucchini marmalade. (Or from pretending that zucchini curls really do taste like pasta.)
So, once you’ve eaten your fill of zucchini bread, zucchini chocolate cake and you’ve canned enough zucchini jam for everyone under your Christmas tree, you may be ready for some creative zucchini alternatives. For instance, you could pretend you are any one of a number of fancy restaurants. After all, every time you go for a nice steak or chicken dinner, there it is on the side of your plate, a sautéed and garlicked pile of zucchini, disguised under the menu name “market vegetable”. (Or “gluten-free” spaghetti.)
After you’ve exhausted every edible zucchini possibility, why not practice your carving skills? Use a paring knife to create a one-of a kind table centrepiece out of a monster zucchini: a boat with a cabbage leaf sail, a totem pole, a pair of Dutch clogs, you name it. Or just cut one into a basket shape, leaving a “handle” and scooping out the pulp. Use this as a serving dish for carrot and celery sticks. (Or for collecting more zucchini from your garden.)
And finally, a truly Canadian option for the squash that got away on you: cut the zucchini lengthwise into slices approximately 1 inch thick and freeze them on cookie sheets. Once frozen, bag them, and then give them to your kids in the winter to use as hockey pucks on the backyard rink. It’ll make a great story for The Globe and Mail to dig up on your future Wayne Gretzky (Connor McDavid): “…so poor, the family couldn’t even afford a real puck…”
It may be time to take an axe (or a paring knife) to the zucchini’s reputation that it is a boring and over-productive vegetable. As the days of summer (and COVID-19) go on, a zucchini may very well be the answer to the next time your child says, “Mom, I’m bored!!!” A word of caution, however: you may just run out of zucchini.
As I try to carve out a writing life, I’ve begun to follow a lot of prompts. Not prompts as in my stomach growling to remind me to have lunch (purely, hypothetical – I never forget to eat lunch) or as in a notification from my phone telling me to stop surfing Google working and get up from my desk and move around. I’m talking about journaling prompts – the kind you can find in lists on Pinterest or that comprise whole books. They can be reasonable (‘Write about your first diary. What did it look like? When did you get it? Why?) and sometimes inane (Imagine you are an elven maiden. What color is your dragon and where are you going on vacation?)
There’s a couple of tremendous things about following such prompts – even the vacationing-and-dragoning-elven-maiden ones. First of all, they are an excellent practice in faith for a writer. I have found time and again, as I follow said prompts, that I am surprised at what comes out on the page. What I write is almost always further than I can think. Meaning that if only I have the faith enough to sit down and write, I will take myself to a place, an adventure, an idea-mine that I couldn’t conceive fully just in my brain-space. Now that I’ve sort of learned that (I still resist inanity sometimes), I am more excited than ever to sit down at my desk and just write. It’s a great way to learn who you are deep down and to find out your capacity. (And what color is your dragon.)
Secondly, prompts can be especially helpful to dig up old memories. Many times, I have heard someone say – I just don’t remember anything from when I was a kid! Open-ended questions like ‘Tell me what it was like to be seven years old’ will only cue blinking eyes – and a blank page.
Without a structure or a spark, it’s hard to remember something in such a specific time. And who cares, anyways? This is not a court deposition and (hopefully) you didn’t murder anyone. Instead, prompts work best in a general way. In my very favorite book about writing – Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird – the author tells her class (and her readers) to think very small. She asks them to write about school lunches.
When I ask my boys what they remember about school lunches, they remind me of pots of pasta and sauce and cheese, tortilla pizzas made in the toaster oven or “snack-y” lunches with crackers and cheese and veggies – because we homeschooled them and they got a (almost always) homemade lunch everyday and ate it while they finished up their math homework. Or while discussing what color their dragons were.
School lunches do not conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings for me. School lunches may have been on the Top Ten List of Why I Wanted to Homeschool My Children in the first place.
So here for your entertainment is my take on What I Remember about School Lunches.
When I think back to school lunches, the first thing that comes to mind is the smell, the weird closed-in, lukewarm-food, old-lunchbox smell that inhabited my lunchbox whether there was food in it or not. When I squeeze my eyes shut, I remember a purple lunchbox with some past-cool or never-was-cool character on the front. Sometimes my mom used MacTac to cover up the picture, to try and “new-it-up” if it was a hand-me-down from one of my siblings. I don’t know who I wanted on my lunchbox instead, maybe Barbie or more honestly, the Muppets, but I never got them.
I probably had a lunchbox all through elementary school. We didn’t have lockers on the ground floor in Derwent school, so our lunchboxes would line the shelf above the coat hooks, our boots on the slanted shelf below them. The noon hour bell would semi-release us – we were free to go fetch our lunchboxes, but had to remain at our desks, eating our baloney sandwiches and pretending that eating with our enemies was normal, hiding any offensive item (like soup in a thermos) from public view and openly consuming chocolate bars and bags of potato chips to advertise that our mothers did indeed love us.
My favorite sandwich would have been a hot dog ensconced in white homemade bread that was slathered lightly with margarine and mustard, the whole thing wrapped, then twisted up, in wax paper. Baloney was a close second, the flatter version of a hot dog that it was.
There was always fruit. An apple, usually, which I never ate and never felt bad about leaving in my lunchbox for mom to shake her head about when I brought it home. She probably left it in the lunchbox, hopefully, unrealistically, for the next day. A banana, if not too bruised, was welcome. Sometimes there were plums, three of them, when in season, and I would eat those, especially happy if they were slightly green. Sometimes there was an orange, the Christmas, easy-peel kind, the kind we called by a politically incorrect name at the time. I would happily consume these, unless, alas, mom had mistakenly fallen for buying oranges with seeds. If I ingested the seed, unaware, I would reject the entire orange as soon as the seed hit my mouth, and it found the recesses of the garbage can outside in the school yard where we were allowed to finish our lunch once the first 15 minutes of the noon hour went by.
By the time I got to junior high, my mom capitulated to packing my lunch in brown paper lunch bags, with the unspoken stipulation that I was to return them for re-use until they were un-useable, unspoken because, well, Mom. While I hadn’t graduated to packing my own lunch (or ever did, even in high school), I started to like what mom packed for me a bit more, or she figured it out a bit better. Tomato sandwiches with mayo and salt and pepper, though soggy, were acceptable. So was Cheez Whiz. More sophisticated things arrived in the bags as I got older: granola bars and sometimes doled-out plastic bags of potato chips which hopefully would not be reduced to crumbs before I got to them at noon.
Okay. Your turn. What do you remember about school lunches?
I know I said I would blog yesterday but I had a bad case of I-don’t-know-what-to-cook-for-supper-itis.
It started in the morning when I asked Rick if he had any idea what he’d like to eat that evening. Unfortunately, he has a permanent case of the aforementioned affliction. I don’t know why I keep asking.
As a general rule, I don’t mind cooking and pretty much, I always like eating. So why is it so hard sometimes to figure out what the heck’s for supper? Sure we could default to a bowl of cereal or a bowl of ice cream or a bowl of bacon – we don’t usually have any little kids around that we need to set “a good example” for. But maybe it’s the way I was brought up – and Rick, too, for that matter: supper usually means some meat, some starch and always, some vegetables.
I don’t ever remember my mom in a dilemma about what she would put on the table. Mom had her repertoire and it was all good. And except for the Co-op cafeteria or McDonalds when we went shopping in Edmonton, I can barely recall even eating in a restaurant with her. Mom was thrifty and bonus: she was a great cook.
And then I moved to Edmonton to go to university. My downfall began when I moved away from my mom’s good habits and figured out I could spend my student loan at Maxwell Taylor’s and on all the offerings at HUB and SUB. Plus my new roommate showed me a brand-new trick: I could eat dessert first.
Whether you have the money to eat out all the time or not, sooner or later, like after a looooong road trip, you just want to eat a home-cooked meal. Or as I, my kids and countless others have announced when they returned home to their mom’s kitchen: I just want to eat some real food.
It’s funny – I didn’t discover The Mom 100 Cookbook until my kids had almost all moved away from home. My cupboard was populated with plenty of Company’s Coming cookbooks but a review in a magazine about this one intrigued me. I ordered it from the library and soon after, I ordered it from Amazon.
Hands down, this has got to be my favorite cookbook. Before Katie Workman entered my life, I had never made jambalaya (her version is called Arroz con Pollo) or a decent meatloaf. And we always had spaghetti with a loose meat sauce. Now I always corral my ground beef into her yummy meatballs.
I know with the Interweb, we don’t really need paper cookbooks anymore. But there’s something to be said for having it all downloaded and on your counter for easy browsing. Plus, like Jean Pare, I now know I can pretty much trust almost everything Katie has to offer. She tells a story before each recipe and you don’t have to scroll miles and miles down the page to get to the ingredients if you want to skip the story for later.
Also important: there’s a picture of every recipe so you can at least have some idea what you’re aspiring for. And the ingredients for the most part are pretty run-of-the-mill: true genius in the kitchen, after all, usually begins by sautéing some onions and garlic. Because as much as I enjoy watching the TV show Chopped, I am really not interested in cooking with natto or squid ink. Probably ever.
What makes The Mom Cookbook unique are the forks-in-the-road that she includes with every recipe. Meaning you can customize each recipe to accommodate the plain-er palates (usually kids) along with the more adventurous and you don’t have to cook a separate meal. (And it’s not just adding Frank’s to everything.) Sooner or later, the kids are gonna move up the taste-bud-food-chain. Because: exposure. I was a picky eater when I was a kid, but most picky eaters eventually get curious about what’s on the other plates around them.
I didn’t cook from Katie’s cookbook last night – I defrosted some ground beef and we made hamburgers in the cast iron frying pan with melted Edam cheese, sautéed mushrooms and fresh greens on a Coop bakery bun. And some homemade fries in the oven. It wasn’t original, but it was good.
And I have no idea what we’re going to eat tonight…
