First, a little update. The reason for my lack of posts is that I recently was offered a new job as a reporter at a local paper... one that's in competition with my current employer, which meant it was a bit of a sticky situation. (It's another paper, Sal, just bigger, so we'll still have the police scanner for entertainment!) Everything's squared away now (I gave my two weeks' notice at the beginning of this week) and I'm looking forward to starting.
Life has been grand lately other than that drama... and the speeding ticket I received tonight -- my first! -- for doing 65 in a 55. I'm not gonna lie, I have a lead foot, so it was a long time coming. But it killed my good mood for a while. Luckily, I was on my way over to The Boyfriend's house, where he had barbequed some chicken breasts for dinner. :)
Speaking of food (pardon the lame segue)... as requested by Don Sal de la Mancha, my
top five childhood food memories, which I've been sporadically working on for quite some time. With the exception of number 4, they're pretty tame, because, hey, this is Indiana. Hope you like them anyway.
5. Although I’m not a “farm girl” per se, I did grow up in rural Indiana and exhibit certain characteristics of this upbringing. Among them, a tendency to say things like “It’s hotter 'n blue blazes out here,” a deep and abiding respect for the sacred game of basketball, and an affinity for sweet corn.
A few weeks ago, I helped my mom and grandma blanch the sweet corn from my parents’ garden and cut it from the cob to freeze. This is after we had a delicious dinner of hamburgers, homegrown goodies like cucumbers, tomatoes and green peppers, and sweet corn on the cob.
As a young child, I hated going out in the garden (or Grandpa’s field) and picking corn. Mostly because it was hot, dirty work, and it inevitably involved bugs. For the same reasons, I usually didn’t like snipping green bean, cleaning apples for homemade applesauce, or the annual pilgrimage to the “Pick –ur- Own” strawberry farm to get strawberries for jam. (Although the ride back from the strawberry farm usually involved the kids in the backseat filling up on fresh strawberries, so that part was fine!) In addition to strawberry jam, Mom also made peach jam (my favorite) and grape jelly. Our basement shelves are still lined annually with mason jars of canned peaches, green beans, sweet pickles, applesauce and more.
But this latest time, I didn’t mind helping with the sweet corn at all. I guess there’s a lot to be said for the familiarity of family traditions. I no longer see it as forced child labor, but as a chance to learn a craft from my parents and grandparents. That, and those four years at college gave me a much greater appreciation for Mom’s homemade food.
4. Watermelon mania: Nearly every summer gathering I can remember as a child involved watermelon. Like many kids, I used to believe that if you swallowed the seeds, a watermelon would grow inside you. (Middle school health class cleared a lot of things up for me.) One of the few times I felt really homesick in Madrid last summer was on the Fourth of July, when I sat on the patio with my host family eating watermelon, and wondered if my family in Indiana was doing the same thing.
But my favorite watermelon story comes from my grandpa, who occasionally will break into stories from his days growing up in Tennessee. He tells about how one night, he and my great-uncles, Clarence and Ed, snuck out to the neighbor’s watermelon patch and gorged themselves on watermelon. (My guess is the incident also involved some homemade grape wine and/or other alcoholic beverages.)
They finally snuck back into their farmhouse and made their way to their upstairs bedroom, when someone – I don’t remember who – needed to relieve himself. Not wanting to make the trip to the outhouse, the offender decided to pee in an old boot. (I’m not kidding.)
The plan would have worked, except the boot wasn’t quite, um, waterproof, and neither was the wood floor of the old farmhouse. My great-grandparents were sleeping in the room underneath.
Can you guess what happens next? Ew. (It grosses us out, too!)
As Grandpa says (with an alarmingly gleeful smile), “Goddamn, we got ourselves a whuppin’ that night!”
3. “Eating out” usually meant Pizza Hut or McDonald’s, but on occasion, we’d go somewhere fancy like The Town Tavern on South Main Street. In retrospect, it’s really more of a greasy spoon than “nice” restaurant, but since it didn’t have Happy Meals or commercials it seemed special. My favorite waitress was Dottie, who usually wore a lot of makeup and seemed kind of exotic to me. She would bring us Mickey Mouses, which really were just fruity pop with fancy straws. But she made such a big production out of them that we thought she had some mythical Disney character whipping them up back in the kitchen.
She still lives in my hometown, and in the backyard of her house, she has hundreds (not tens, hundreds) of lawn ornaments, including Snow White and all seven dwarves. It makes me wonder if she doesn’t have connections in Disneyland after all…
2. Halloween, Easter, Christmas, Valentine’s Day – any holiday involving candy. I was always “that kid” who hoarded her candy in secret stashes. My brother and sister would eat all their candy within the week after the holiday. I would magically produce chocolate bunnies in June, candy hearts in March. As the middle child, it was one of those few moments when I could lord it over both of them. :)
1. Dad’s double-layer cake. Or, as it’s affectionately known in our house, “crumble cake.”
My culinary-challenged father decided to make my mom a cake one year (probably for her birthday). My sister and I sat at the kitchen table and watched, because it was something of an event for dad to be making food that wasn’t cereal. My sister was about 6, I was probably 4. My mom was in the next room with my baby brother.
Dad meticulously measured ingredients (to add to the boxed cake mix). We could tell by his concentration that this was serious business, and he really wanted to impress Mom.
Soon he’d baked two beautiful layers of chocolate cake in round pans. Erin (the sister) and I oohed and ahhed as he brought them from the oven. He flipped one onto a plate, and we oohed and ahhed some more. It smelled heavenly and looked moist and perfect.
He took a tub of vanilla frosting and began frosting the first layer. Unfortunately, no one told him that you have to let a cake cool before you can frost it. It immediately began to crumble like Roman ruins.
"&*(%$," dad muttered.
“Is everything all right?” Mom called from the living room.
Dad assured her that we were fine and tried to valiantly glue the pieces of cake back together with frosting. It didn’t work well, but he had a shaky foundation.
He still didn’t realize the cake was yet too warm, so he thought, hey, if I put the other layer on top, no one will notice the bottom layer.
He gingerly placed the top layer on and spread a bit of frosting on top.
"^&$%^! #$@%! ^#$$@#!” he yelled.
(I don’t really remember which expletives he used, because I was only 4. Suffice it to say it was nothing my mom wanted him to say in front of two little girls.)
Mom came into the kitchen at that point and cracked up when she saw the wreckage of the cake, and pretty soon we all were laughing.
We put the pieces in a big plastic dish and ate them like finger food.
To this day, we all agree it’s the best cake we’ve ever had.
