Eating

I saw this on Facebook this morning and it took me back to my childhood.  My mother was a good cook, but she cooked a few "normal" things like meat loaf, beef roast, pork roast, fried chicken, spaghetti.  I remember the day she was excited to try a new recipe she'd just learned about.  It was called "lasagna" and it ended up being so popular that it became part of her regular list of things to cook.  My father loved Italian food so much he insisted he was part Italian, not Irish (to the best of my knowledge there is no Italian blood in my DNA).

I remember when my father tried this new food he heard about.  You had to go to the store to get it. It was called "pizza."  This little hole in the wall place in North Beach made the pizza when you came in.  I got to stand on a box to make me tall enough to look over and see them making it--and they would give me pieces of cheese while t hey were putting it on the pizza.  We never had things like "pepperoni" or "sausage."  When we got the pizza, we would go to the liquor store next door and pick up a gallon jug of  red wine for my father to have with his pizza.

I don't remember when my parents learned that you could order Chinese food and have it delivered.  "Let's have C* food" (my parents always used the negative slang term for Chinese which I never realized was not polite until I was an adult).  We usually had fried shrimp with hot sauce, fried rice, chow mein, and fortune cookies.  I don't remember a vegetable dish, but we probably had at least one.

I remember waiting for seasons for fruits...you didn't have strawberries until strawberry season, or oranges until orange season (which was in the winter, so Santa could put oranges in our Christmas stocking).

I never had yogurt or curry foods until I was an adult.  Most days we had oatmeal or cream of wheat for breakfast. Oatmeal was served with cream (real cream) and brown sugar and cream of wheat with white sugar. If we had cold cereal, it was either corn flakes or Rice Krispies...never sweetened cereals (did they sell them?).  Lunch sandwiches were peanut butter & jelly, bologna, or tuna or egg salad, always on white "balloon bread" (which I still prefer)

I remember seeing pineapples, but didn't know how to cut one and I was an adult before I tried.  My mother made pineapple upside down cake occasionally, but always with canned pineapple.

 Things are so different today, and I suspect our kids had even stranger foods than most of their friends, since we often had food from the country of the guests we were hosting (I got to be a good Brasilian cook!)  How many of our kids' friends knew about feijoada?

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                                                   PHOTO OF THE DAY

Happy Birthday, Char!

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Food

 I don't think I've ever dreamed about food before, but last night I dreamed I was at some sort of festival...there was going to be judging, but I don't know judging what--animals? food? something else?

I was sitting at a table near the food court and there were people lining up to buy biscuits.  Someone told me if I wanted a biscuit, I should get in line because they would sell out...and that they were the best, fluffiest biscuits ever.  I could see the woman making them holding one up and I'd never seen a biscuit so fall and light looking

Walt came along and I asked him to get me a biscuit, but he disappeared and never came back.  (I didn't have any money so I couldn't buy them myself).   My mother was sitting with me (first time I've dreamed of her since she died) and I asked her to get biscuits, figuring she would get a biscuit for each of us but she just bought one biscuit for the two of us to share.  I like to eat the top part last because it was my favorite, but she ate the top part and gave me the bottom part.

That's when Ned came downstairs to let Bouncer out and Bubba leaped into my lap, waking me up, so I never did get to finish the biscuit story!

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Remember those wonderful days when we all first got VHS recorders and recorded our favorite TV shows and learned we could fast forward through the commercials?  We have now gotten to where we pretty much have  to watch commercials on many shows.  If you're watching a recording they have now made it impossible to fast forward through the commercials, and they also put commercials at the bottom of your screen, which covers up what is going on in the show you are watching, but you can't get rid of it.  Even on some pay channels (like paramount +) you can't fast forward and it will show you at the top left corner how many more commercials there are to go ("#2 of 5 commercials").  

We are also seeing more commercials between acts of shows. I timed it on one show and the act of the show was 5 minutes long and the commercial break was 7 minutes long.

At least you can fast forward through recordings from the Food Network.  (Shhh...don't tell them I mentioned it!)

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PHOTO OF THE DAY

My mother and her siblings
(2 of them have died at the time of this picture)

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Food!

 Ned took pictures of all the food Marie cooked for us for my birthday dinner.

There was enough for for us to have leftovers for two nights!

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