My mom is not a good cook.
Growing up, a typical family meal (or should I say the typical family meal, since it was served at least twice a week?) consisted of a shriveled baked potato, burned-to-a-crisp hamburger patty, canned green beans and white bread with margarine.
Oh yes, and milk gravy for the potato.
Never heard of it? Lucky you. Here’s the recipe. Basically, you add milk and flour to your hamburger grease and boil until thick.
To drink, we had Kool-Aid, usually cherry, in plastic tupperware glasses that always felt a little slick from years of washing in the same sink as the milk-gravy pan.
Good times.
Also included in my mom’s recipe repertoire were such favorites as:
Hamburger Casserole – all the basic ingredients of the typical dinner but with added cream of mushroom soup and cheddar cheese
Hamburger Tomato Soup – home canned tomato soup with hamburger and elbow macaroni
Mock Fried Rice – white Minute Rice with crumbled hamburger, onion and tomato.
Raise your hand if you are sensing a theme.
She also made what she called Tuna Fish Rarebit – creamed tuna on toast. Gag.
(On the other hand, her cinnamon rolls were excellent and I’ve never been able to duplicate her yummy pie crust.)
She did not have The Joy of Cooking. I’m talking about both the cookbook and the emotion. My mom had just had too many years of what-am-I-going-to-make-for-dinner-tonight-with-hardly-any-money-too-many-kids-and-a-meat-and-potatoes-man-to-feed. Cleaning the bathroom was less drudgery to her. But, thanks to her efforts we never went hungry.
Unless we chose to.
Twelve years ago, on my first Thanksgiving as a bonafide grown-up married lady I offered to cook the entire meal. Because I wanted to enjoy eating it.
I hadn’t really learned how to cook at home, but I wasn’t worried. I knew I could follow a recipe and had some natural aptitude.
And everyone’s standards were really low.
The meal turned out pretty well and a new tradition was born. For the next three years, I prepared the feast in our tiny apartment kitchen and transported to either my parent’s or my in-law’s, whichever set of parents we were spending the holiday with. When we bought our first house, we began inviting both sets of parents to eat with us.
My mom was always the most unintentional entertaining guest. One year she wore a blonde wig she had found at a garage sale. She declared that it made her feel bea-u-ti-ful! It might have looked fine if it wasn’t on sideways…
And so our holiday went for the first nine years of our married life. I loved bustling around the kitchen, listening to the parade on tv, and bossing Mr. Frantic around. I love preparing a big meal and sharing it with my family.
But then we moved 3000 miles away. And I felt like Thanksgiving was a bit depressing without extra people to cook for. So for the next three years, I didn’t cook.
One year we went to a hotel restaurant and felt like losers. Most of the people there were with large extended families. They sat at large tables in the center of the dining room. Scattered about the edge of the room were medium sized tables with families of five or six people. Then, wedged in by the kitchen doors or way over by the bathrooms were a few small tables for our family of three and one or two old people dining alone. I was tempted to ask those lone diners to join us and pretend to be our family, but then we’d have to move to a bigger table. And they were all full of happy shiny people.
The other two years we went on vacation. And we ate at restaurants, but we were surrounded by other vacationers, several of whom were probably escaping their extended family gatherings, so our little family didn’t seem so pathetic, pitiable, unloved, unusual. It was actually fun.
This year, we are back home in Oregon and I am really looking forward to cooking the big meal. Newt is excited to help; she wants to learn to be a really good “cooker”.
I’m trying to pass on what I know, but she’ll need to ask grandma for help with pie crust.
And milk gravy.
