Cook Wannabee

Welcome back!

I do not really have anything to talk about today, I just wanted to blab.

That sounds pitiful, doesn’t it? Well, there is the phone, the internet (hello, here I am), family, friends. When I am in the kitchen, I usually do not talk much. I try hard to avoid messing up.

The sound of the smoke alarm going off tends to make me think that I am not cooking right. Others might feel the same way, too. Every tome that is goes off, the cats run and hide. Oh well, never said that I was an expert. Thank God.

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Have you checked out the ads on the television lately?

When they show burgers, the burgers are thick and have a lot of stuff piled on them. How are you supposed to eat them? Sishkebab ( I am not sure of the spelling on that) I can understand eating one piece at a time, the skewer after all.

Burgers are best when you can get in a good bite with a little of everything that is on the bun. I have seen some burgers that look almost 2 inches thick. How do you make sure that is cooked properly? With all of the illnesses that can be found on meat, in meat, and in restaurants, thoroughly cooked food is safer than something that is partially raw in the center. I am not a cave man after all.

What is your idea about burgers?

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Had a dream last night. Went to a reunion that involved everyone staying at the school for a couple of days. Don’t remember what type of school, just school. In my dream I drove a pale yellow Volkswagen Beetle.

According to the dream, we all lived at the school while attending it. In the dream I had to clean out my bedroom, before everyone sat to eat. This one apartment my friend lived in had a lot of hidden cabinets, and two kitchens. One rally big kitchen, and one small and tidy kitchen. In the big kitchen, not only were there lots of cabinets, both above and below; but, there was also WILBUR.

One area of the big kitchen was an outward pointing corner of cabinets that went from the ceiling to the floor. There were a lot of little knobs all over it, that were painted a light blue. My friend used the small kitchen mostly because if you bumped that one corner cabinet with knobs, WILBUR would come rolling out and unfold. WILBUR was a huge folding table that was 8′x4′ and big. Once WILBUR ws out, it was very tiresome to fold it back in and it would keep trying to come back out and unfold. Most of my dream was spent trying to get the table back into its storage cabinet, and helping the new tenants refold WILBUR over and over agin. We finally had to tie many of the knobs together to keep it contained. When I finally gathered up the things that I dropped, because of WILBUR, I went out to find my car.

That car was parked in one corner of the parking lot and it was filled with all types of yellow cars, trucks, vans, etc. I wanted my car! I wanted my VW ! I wanted to leave.

Boy, was I glad to wake up and finally feel like I was going to get some rest.

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Yup, I did spell out Crisco fight. You have heard of water balloon fights, squirt guns, water hose fights. These are things that can be fun and get a lot of laughter involved. Well, one day a few years ago our family (before I got married) got into a fun mood. We lived in Florida and sometimes we got into water fights. Well, we ended up with Crisco one day. All four of us were smeared all over with generous gobs of Crisco.

When we were finally able to get it all cleaned up, our hair had new shine to it! Of course it was not easy to clean up, but I remember all of the laughter that happened. Our sides were sore the next day because we had laughed so hard. Families can be fun. Laughter can be one of the most glorious parts of family fun.

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I imagine that we all have made mistakes when cooking for the first few times. I know that I did. I’ve written about a couple so far. Well, here is another one.

When mom decided to help me learn about cooking we lived in St. Louis, Mo. The St. Louis Post Dispatch had a cooking section where kids could learn how to cook by following recipes. It was mostly fun. I remember one recipe for Mulligan stew. I remember potatoes put on to boil.

I also remember not stirring them. They burned on the bottom and the rest of the potatoes picked up the flavor of the burn. I hadn’t realized this until the complete stew was made. Yuk. To this day I remember to stir what ever I am cooking, and if not stirring, I get it iff the heat or the stove. Burned Mulligan stew is not nice. What an understatement.

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Thinking on food disasters reminds me of a disaster that happened when I was still a girl and living with mom.

We’d had turkey and she didn’t want to pick the bones to clean off the left over meat. So, she decided that she would make stock from the turkey bones. She put them on to boil and left me in charge. OOPS

Well, I got sleepy and figured that there was a lot of water in the pot and it was on a slow boil, so I could get in a quick nap. Didn’t know that water evaporates quickly when it is going to rain, which it was going to rain that day. When I woke up, the apartment was filled with very stinky smoke half-way down the walls.

Mom and I both opened all of the windows, both the front door and the back door. The smoke started to pour out of the apartment. The stock pot was ruined of course. The turkey bones were charred, the idea of stock, lost. A neighbor cam out and asked if we needed any help. Embarrassing !! I had to admit what happened. The neighbor offered the use of a spare fan to help evacuate the smoke. There was a big drawback to this episode, though. The curtains in the apartment were never the same. No matter how often that mom washed them, they always smelled like burned turkey bones. I never did take a nap when something was on the stove again. Lesson learned the hard way. I thank God that there was never a fire.

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Many people will write about their recipes. My sister has taught me that disasters also teach.

Well, I learned a hard lesson one day back in the 80’s. I wanted to make some soup. I had peeled some potatoes (didn’t learn until later that the peelings have a lot of taste and vitamins in them), diced up some yellow onions, cut up some celery, gathered some seasonings, diced up some turkey I had leftover from a previous meal, and some broccoli.

Most of that would have been great. I learned and my family learned , painfully, that the broccoli was a very bad choice to add to the soup. As it cooked, it smelled wonderful. It looked good, too. Well, I served it …….I was told that I was trying to poison my family. My husband and my niece definitely protested. I hadn’t tasted it yet and did so. They were right of course. The broccoli did NOT want to blend in at all. It tasted horrible.

Well, macaroni and cheese that night. I poured out the ’soup’ for the dog next door to eat, he would et almost anything. Guess what? He turned up his nose after sniffing it, then went and rolled in a nearby spot where a neighbor’s septic tank was leaking. The ultimate dog insult. I do not believe that I will ever forget it.

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