THE CURSE OF THE MOMMY, PART 1

Let me just state at the outset that my mother is a lovely person. Anyone who knows Ann knows she is just about the most kind and patient person ever, and that's including all those people from the Bible. She is a truly wonderful human being, so don't think that I am flippantly choosing to tell you one of the deepest and darkest secrets of my childhood involving my mother and her kitchen. Because I am not. Being flippant.
My mother was a horrible cook. I mean really, really bad. She made meals that if I think about them intensely enough they still can conjure up that gag reflex (ground beef/tomato paste/corn/olives, I am looking in your direction). Not that she didn't have her reasons, mind you, for her "cooking problem". No, my mother certainly didn't deserve her punishment, trying to cook for us rotten children. But I am not here to tell her side of the story, I'm here to tell mine--so off we go.
Most of the meals she provided to us children suffered from her own triple threat of cooking folly: Lack of budget, lack of time, and lack of any native talent when it came to improvisational cooking.

LACK OF BUDGET

My family growing up was very middle class, what I'm sure today would be considered poor. There were six kids, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom on a tight budget. We weren't without the bare necessities, but I do remember that each birthday and Christmas was sure to bring us a few toys and an equal measure of socks and underpants. A real problem for us kids was our total lack of prepackaged sweetened snack treats (Oh, the shaming realization that my mom would never be a Hostess mom!) and fast food. We begged for Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's--you know, the finer things in life. I can count on one hand the number of times we went out to a "restaurant" as a family. (Forget my mom's cooking for a moment and join me now for a fond remembrance of my favorite family outing to a restaurant.)

It was a Sunday after church in summer, and I was probably 9. We climbed into our 1976 Oldsmobile station wagon (powder blue with faux wood paneling on the sides) and made the very familiar, very sweaty 2 hour drive down to Grandma's house in Bakersfield to have lunch and spend the afternoon. There must have been some sort of misunderstanding this particular day because Grandma wasn't home and she hadn't even left us our customary lunch sack full of candy bars to melt on the front porch. My parents --after realizing that they could either turn around and spend another 2 hours driving home for a meal of whoknowswhat or stop at the nearest gas station and let us buy our own lunch sacks full of candy bars-- pulled into a nearby Happy Steak restaurant, what today would be a Denny's. We children were sufficiently awed and excited as we entered such unfamiliar territory and waited for the splendor to unfold. Menus! Straws! Saltines in cellophane! We thought our tiny hearts would burst. Perhaps this family trip to an actual restaurant is so clear in my mind because it happened to be the one and only time we ever ate out on a Sunday. I can still remember thinking later that day, "Well, Mom and Dad are surely now going to Hell and I am not even convinced it was worth it, even though I do get to keep these two plastic swords that held my sandwich together".

As kids, we would frequently yell "let's go to McDonald's for dinner!" and my parents would always wittily yell back "let's go to McPedersen's instead!", which is just the sort of hilarious tom-foolery that we Pedersens have always enjoyed. Another funny thing my dad used to say was "What? Are your arms painted on?" which was his humorous response whenever we kids asked him to do something for us, like get us a drink of water or put up the Christmas lights. He also would burp and say "choo" afterwards, pretending he had just sneezed. Just a funny, funny guy, my dad. But I am starting to get a little confused with all these digressions, so if you don't mind let's get back to the business at hand. My point is that there just wasn't money in the food budget for the shortcuts that would have helped my mother's cooking along, and that was only the first problem.

TOO MANY SUBSTITUTIONS

My mother also made the mistake of thinking that if she didn't have the actual ingredient that the recipe called for, she probably had something else that would work just as well (probably). Example: The differences between V-8 juice and tomato sauce are practically indistinguishable, especially on homemade pizza. Fact: V-8 juice is nasty and no one will be fooled into thinking that you just made very pink pizza sauce. (And just a side note here, I asked Papa John and he said outside of Canada, cooked hamburger and cheddar cheese are not actually pizza toppings) Another Fact: when you are trying to make a tomato and hamburger sauce for elbow macaroni and add in red food coloring to make the V-8 sauce look more tomato sauce-ish, the V-8 will still be pink -- and now so will all the noodles. (And I am asking, why did we even have V-8 juice at all? Shouldn't that money have gone straight into cans of tomato sauce?) And although this technically wasn't cooking, was mine the only family to suffer through the powdered milk fiasco? Who was she fooling? The milk was blue! And like we children wouldn't notice a 2 inch head of foam sitting atop our bowls of puffed wheat cereal. Powdered milk belongs in only one place people, and that place is called "food storage".

LACK OF TIME

What do you get when you cross a harried mother with a half-dozen hungry children? One of my mother's signature dishes; Blackened Surprise. As patient as my mother has always been with my father, her own children, and years of her in-home daycare children, she is equally that impatient with meal preparation. This could possibly be due in part to her busy schedule, or something. Seriously, if she had written The Joy of Cooking, it would have been titled The Joy of Cooked, because for her the journey was not half the fun. My mom's dad used to tell her "when it's brown it's cooking and when it's black it's done", and she has always taken this advice to heart. I am not kidding. She repeated it to us just last week as we gathered over a steaming dish of blackened green beans with the charred remains of slivered almonds. Of course my mother never sets out to burn dinner, it is just that when it happens she isn't particularly remorseful--and I know this because as apologetic as she is, she still feeds it to us anyway. I think she has actually learned to enjoy the taste.

The burning-the-food problem stems from my mother's first, unalterable rule of cooking: Always cook with the burner set on "HIGH". I grew up with a profound fear of the cherry-red burner. In the days before the microwave, my mom would often plunk a frozen block of hamburger onto her old iron skillet and begin defrosting it and cooking it simultaneously, thus saving oodles of time. To further hurry the whole thing along she cranked the burner up and then promptly left the room to start another project. I can remember more than once searching her out to tell her dinner was on fire (I actually spent most of my childhood believing that cooked hamburger is black and crunchy). One morning just a few winters ago she decided to heat up the last inch of hot chocolate that was left in the sauce pot and (naturally!) turned the heat up as high as it would go and then went upstairs and took a shower. My father was awakened by the smell of burning pan and went down to find black smoke billowing from the kitchen and the outer coating of the pan literally melted into little pools of aluminum, puddling there on the cook top. It is truly a wonder to me that she never started any of those wildfires that California is so famous for.

In closing, I would just like to add that my mother (who gave me permission to write all this, by the way) is really quite a good cook nowadays, with the exception of Jello--which is a story for another time. She doesn't burn things much anymore, and now that she no longer has all of us kids bugging her while she cooks, (and furthermore, now that she has access to such ethnically authentic convenience foods as Prego) she is quite capable of making many delicious dishes that everyone enjoys--everyone except Josie (this is because Josie, by her own admission, hates positively everything). And in case you were wondering, next month's part 2 of the Curse of the Mommy is all about my own abysmal cooking. Since I thought it might be enjoyable to take a peek at a few of my mom's delicious dishes from yesteryear, I have included a couple of recipes from my childhood.

RECIPES

Here are just a few of the yum-o dishes that my mother used to make. To her credit, most of these were retired in the late '80's, as we kids became teenagers. Enjoy!

Tater Tot Surprise:

ground beef, can of cream of something soup, package of tater tots

Minestrone Bake:

ground beef, can of minestrone soup, can of bean with bacon soup, package refrigerator biscuits

Burritos:

ground beef, refried beans, flour tortillas

Beef Stroganoff:

ground beef, can of cream of mushroom soup, sour cream, egg noodles

Spaghetti:

ground beef, packet of McCormick's spaghetti sauce seasonings, can of tomato sauce (or you know--whatever), spaghetti noodles (drops of red food coloring optional)