Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Technophobe II

Every time I blog I encounter the unknown.
How does the system work?
First, I have to kind of hack in.
Secondly, some blogs appear and others do not.
My latest post, "Grandma Food," doesn't appear.
I have also lost one called "The Rubber Ducky Opening."
And as my late husband said,
"Did anyone ever get help from 'Help'?"
Grrrrr.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Grandma Food

My dear Winifred, as well as my other dear friend Doc Bubbles--I have few friends so those I do have I know intimately and by name--are um what's the nice way to say this--encouraging me to blog today. This is the exact reason or one exact reason I feared to start blogging; people keep after you to continue. To calm my two fans, I will take Winifred's request to blog about what I had for dinner.

Do you remember where you were when you first heard of fish sticks? What about your initial broccoli? There never was a time before baked potato as far as I'm concerned. Did you realize you can cook yourself institutional food right at home? Then you can sit down and say, "Can you believe the food in this place?"

That was my dinner tonight. Same story at lunch: peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich with lettuce on it, with a side of raw carrots.

Thinking about overrated home-cooking reminded me of a camping trip in Maine, when we used to go to a little gas station to buy magazines and beef jerky strips and Little Debbie snack cakes. One day I bought a ladies' fundraising cookbook called "What's Cookin' in Down East Maine." The recipes had strange insatiable fascination, and as Den was driving I would read aloud the recipes to him.

"Do you want to hear 'Whoopie Pies'?" I'd say. "Yeah!" he'd answer, "and then find something with maraschino cherries in it!"
So then we'd hear 'Cherry Macaroons,' whose first ingredient was Spry. My favorite was 'Pig Eating Good Cake,' made w/ yellow cake mix and canned mandarin oranges. You top it with 1 large Cool Whip, 1 sm. instant vanilla pudding, add drained crushed pineapple and mix.

There's something visceral, ancestral, about Cranberry Relish Mold that takes me back to church spaghetti night with my grandmother in Ferguson, MO in the 1940s. So, that's my blog today: Grandma food.