Guidebook For Liberal Trolls
The strangest thing my mother ever did to vegetables was to cook them. To death. Didn’t matter what color they went in, they came out a uniform gray-green. Salt and pepper were exotic spices, to be feared. WASP cooking at its finest. If it ain’t gray it ain’t done.
Drew, do you still have the fear of any cooked vegetable? Our mothers probably went to the same cooking school when they were young. Perhaps, they were ahead of their time what with the e-coli mess with spinach, lettuce and onions. Cook ‘em till they are a soggy, fibrous mass and nothing will live through that.
Skipper, please may I keep this? I want to print it out forever and ever - I haven’t laughed this hard in YEARS! [btw, my ego is dancing - you mentioned me, a little weird but you mentioned me.]
Drew and Kirk - I think our moms all learned to cook at the same awful school. I did not know oatmeal could be eaten with a spoon until I was an adult (my mom thought she had a magic oatmeal pot since it never went down, ‘cuz we all waited until she left the kitchen to dump back in the pot and run). Now that I know it can be smooth and creamy - well it is a fav. But I still harbor bad pork flashbacks as she believed it had to be cooked to shoe leather and then burned to a crisp. Now the only fond memory of pork I have was from Germany where the whole damn thing sat on the table staring at us but man - that little piggy was roasted to perfection.
I forgot - 11.5 should read - insert an obsence word (directed at your victim) somewhere in the first sentence. . .
That is how I know I’m being troll attacked and not just being questioned - I am usually called a stupid f*** or some such nicey nice.
Great list though. And one of the best you’ve written.
Wardmama4, did your mother have an electric broiler to cook pork chops? Mine did and it was fight night whenever she attempted to use that damned broiler. All it took was about 10^-12 seconds after the pork chops to be fully cooked before they turned into hockey pucks with a little bone in them. When she died we threw that cursed broiler into the garbage. None of the kids wanted it and sure didn’t want to pass on the curse of the broiler to any innocents.
Ouch. I regret the bad joke about the hand....
Posted by armadefoc
02/03/2007 at 08:03 PM
Vinegar in the spinach? Must have been trying to cause the spinach to shrink up (think astringent)and the bacon to provide a bit of taste to what was turned into the slimy mass. To this day I refuse to eat any peas, green beans, asparagus, and cooked carrots because of the horrors of childhood. Beets? Hey, those are pretty good, but my mom never attempted them.
Suspect that our moms were treated to the “cook the meat until well done since this prevents parasite infections” and since it was true for pork then it must be true for beef as well. Could it be that there was an evil Betty Crocker out there that published a British cook book that was published in the US by mistake?
Great mom stories - I guess it was the advent of relating poor cooking techniques with bacteria and disease that did them all in. [I use to kid my mom, one of her cookbooks actually says remove the pot from the fire!] Yes I remember the veggies too - I never had pizza until I was a senior in high school. Discovered peanut butter and jelly in college! Yes, believe it or not. My dad was of German descent and we ate huge meals at all meals - sandwichs, chips, cold cereal - not allowed in my house 99% of the time. Traveling (by the cursed vistacruiser stationwagon) was a real treat for us - because we actually got to eat real American food (burgers, hot dogs, chips). Actually my dad did sneak us out for fast food (as it was back then) and my mom never passed a hot fudge sundae that she didn’t love (hence my fondness for same). And in my moms defense - she makes the absolute best turkey noodle soup - I’ve never gotten it right. She never shared a recipe - now that I’m older I know why - the favs are in my head and writing them down just doesn’t work - I always forget a step, ingredient or amount. . . And she did not (for some unknown reason) overcook seafood - I grew up with lobsters playing chase with cats and then enjoying them for dinner, cleaning the trout or salmon and a simple fry. Who knows why most of the other stuff was soooooooo overcooked.
You can see I don’t like profanity - can’t even spell obscene!
One of the lovely food things I remember growing up was eating our crops. For quite a few years we planted large gardens in several of the different locals we were stationed in (my dad worked for CONOCO and we moved around like the military - except we moved more often). This SOUNDS good but for some bizarre reason the only really successful things we grew were tomatoes (I love these), cucumbers (a little less enthusiasm), and varieties of squash.
Fresh veggies are a wonderful thing (which is why I still love fresh tomatoes) but my Mom was a canner and given the selection well...I no longer have an affinity for pickles. But this is not the worst.
In order to save money and because my dad liked it for some reason I have never understood, we skipped meat 2 or three times a week in favor of breaded and fried squash (egg plant, zucchini, whatever). This went on for several years...a greasy, nasty smelling, miasma of breaded lukewarm snot, smothered in ketchup 3 times a week. My parents were the “you don’t leave the table until you plate is empty ‘cause there’s kids starving in Asia” type, too.
Do you now how much I hate fried squash? No you don’t and don’t even imagine that you do. I almost freaked on my wife the first (and last) time my Mom talked her into trying to cook fried squash. Parents always accuse their children of not listening but I think it goes both ways as my Mom had told my wife how much I loved it as a kid when she’d cook fried squash. Talk about living in denial!!!
Oh by the way, at 3:22 Am CST in Milwaukee, WI the actual outside temperature is -10F and the wind chill is -25F.
Where the HELLLLLLLLLL is my stinking Global Warming!!!!!!!!!
My parents grew up in poor sharecropper families in South Alabama during the Depression. No electricity. They ate what they grew and cooked over wood burning stoves. Want butter? Go sit on the porch for a few hours and churn some up. Running water? Sure, just run out to the back yard and pull up a bucket from the well.
Everywhere we moved during the 50’s and 60’s (which was every two years on USAF schedule) within weeks after we got settled into our house, a garden magically appeared in the back yard. There were green peppers first, then tomatoes, green beans and yes ... the hated SQUASH! The only saving grace was a watermelon or two.
And yes, everything was cooked until every last bacterium was not only dead but also burnt to a crisp. Lots of fried chicken (which I still love to this day). I HATE FRIED SQUASH though! I was forced to eat it, practically at gun point. I am eternally scarred emotionally by that. Boiled carrots were like mush. Every meal had a heaping bowl of some kind of dark green vegetable that had been cooked so long in a pressure cooker that it was impossible to identify what it had been while still in the wild.
“LEAVE NOTHING ON YOUR PLATE!” was the order of the day. Starving Chinese kids and all that too. Wash up and get to the table on time or go hungry. If you didn’t get to the table before Dad started prayer you were shit outta luck.
However ... in 1980 I bought my mother a microwave oven, one of the first. Dad had recently died and she lived alone and I wanted to make things a little easier for her. My wife and kids and I visited Mom the week after the microwave had been delivered to see how she liked it.
Try to imagine a woman in her late 50’s as excited as any 5-year-old and acting just like one. Hopping up and down and babbling on about her new toy. We had to watch her nuke some eggs and listen to her describe how “light and fluffy” they were going to be - and no greasy frying pan to clean up afterward! This was heaven to her!
It was about that time that I began to really understand how hard life had been when she was growing up. All it took was a “modern convenience” to bring out the child in Mom and show me the enormous gulf that existed between her generation and mine ....
... until we finished lunch and I caught myself chastising my son for not wanting to eat everything on his plate. Those starving Chinese kids have nothing to worry about. We’re still looking out for them.
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