Magic

Lunch is my day job, right? What I want my day job to be when I grow up is a writer. And still do lunch. Maybe. But for now, when I write and cook, sometimes bad things happen, like burning the beans. Hey, Writer-Baby, that’s what your mother’s crock-pot is for. If you stick the food in it early enough, it gets done, you don’t have to check it, and YOU DON’T BURN THE BEANS.

?????

I went to a luncheon the other day. The women at my table were much younger than me, with small children to feed, and I discovered, like me, the other women developed total amnesia about cooking as a meal hour approached. They simply could not think what to cook, especially something that would appeal to grown-ups and a three-year-old, who can be pickier than a vegetarian boyfriend who doesn’t like tangy.

This is America, folks. We’ve got more food and more kinds of food than anybody ever had before on the face of the earth, even here in my Small Town, America. I’ve got cooking magazines out the wazoo. Even after I’ve given stacks of cook books away, I’ve got more cookbooks than anybody could possibly need. So why, if I’m not paying close attention, the day, then the week and the month rolls by when I’m thinking SO WHAT AM I GOING TO COOK FOR LUNCH TODAY?

My mother churned out meal after meal after meal after meal, three times a day. Even though we weren’t a It’s-Meatloaf-It-Must-Be-Tuesday family, she limited her main meals to a meat and two vegetables. She didn’t have so many choices of what to cook, and she certainly didn’t give us a choice about what we would eat, though she did let me take canned asparagus off my must-have-at-least-one-bite-of list after that unfortunate occurrence when I was proven right that I really could not eat canned asparagus, but she didn’t substitute a veggie I could eat, either. She did admit, more than once, that what she would really like to do as far as cooking went was to cook all three meals early in the day, make us eat them, clean up after, and be done with it. She understood this missed the meal-point altogether.

For our luncheon we had, as my friend emailed me later, “hothouse cucumber salad with something something, seared tuna blah, blah, topped with crabmeat and wasabi, grilled peach with raspberry sauce. Thank goodness for the ice cream, is all I can say.”

You just know I am not going to be searing tuna here in veggie land. In despair, I demanded the boyfriend state what he really liked to eat. “We’ve had this conversation,” he said. “I forgot, tell me again,” I said. Once he named fried tofu, he was stuck. Finally he came up with cheese quesadillas or cheese quesadillas with soysage (that fine veggie product from Morningstar), and sometimes peanut butter and crackers or peanut butter and jelly and crackers. It’s what he makes for himself when I don’t make his meal for him. Why? He likes them.

So that’s it. I decided I needed to cook what I liked for a while. Mostly for supper it’s watermelon. That doesn’t require cooking. But today I made my fave, what I would have for my birthday if I was cooking for myself: Mexican Casserole. I know casseroles are partially responsible for making Mississippi the fattest state in the union. But like my friend with her ice cream, and my boyfriend with his peanut butter, I like it.

And he who really hasn’t liked Mexican Casserole—chili upsets his stomach, cumin, just ugh—ate two helpings. I think he appreciated the canned red sauce, which was a new addition.

Stay tuned for the recipe.

de-evolution

I gotta admit I’m not a fan of Rice Krispie Treats®, that ubiquitous treat invented at Iowa State University of Science and Technology in the 1930s. I didn’t eat them as a kid, but my kid did, so when my friend brought them to the Meredith English majors’ bake sale in 1998 and the young college women gobbled them up, I figured the kids had grown up, still liking the food that made them kid-happy, a kind of dumming down of the taste buds. Today I discovered Rice Krispie Treats are sold as a boxed cookie at the grocery store….did you know that? Rice Krispie Treats® have four ingredients and take fifteen minutes to make, but if you don’t have the time or the microwave, you can take twenty minutes to run down to your favorite food mart and buy yourself some ready-made, and they probably come with a lot more than four ingredients.

My friend who makes her own noodles for chicken noodle soup was not impressed.

It's Not Just Nuts

Sometimes, no matter that we all have the same time, there’s just not time to make lunch.

Tell me why the pecans in PLANTERS Deluxe MIXED NUTS are better than the pecans in any of the PLANTERS PECAN LOVERS MIXes? And even though my boyfriend leaves me (it’s REAL Deluxe LOVE) every single pecan in the PLANTERS Deluxe MIXED NUTS, I just can’t get enough pecans and will buy the PLANTERS PECAN LOVERS MIX, even though I eat every one of those pecans wishing they were the PLANTERS Deluxe MIXED NUTS pecans?

And why don't I just make my own roasted pecans?

Oh, the time thing.

The Loveliest of....

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And Take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A. E. Houseman

Peaches, not cherries. Fruit, not blooms. The peaches are in at the Apple Farm, the In-veggie place in Cleveland. One friend told me she loved the white peaches, another preferred the yellow. My dad’s cousin who works at the Apple Farm said yellow…then he showed me why. The whites bruised easily. You would have to eat a box in one day before they all ruined, so of course I got the yellow. But I caged a sack of bruised whites to give them a try. Oh, me, oh, my. Whites won the taste test, hands down. Juicy and sweet and just plain peachy. The yellows were hard, and not so sweet, but never mind. Not a one went to waste. My mom used to buy a bushel of peaches from Parchman, the state prison farm down the road. She would freeze them for summer ice cream and lazy pies, or just peaches with Miss Mildred’s angel food cake. I made the lazy pie, and bought the ice cream. My grandmother made this pie with blackberries…mostly ones she’d picked and frozen. It can be made with canned blackberries, or most any juicy fruit if you are not a purist. My son prefers blackberries, also, but he wasn’t at home for today’s peach cobbler. Cindy, diet buddy, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Oh, the weight loss ground you will lose….but then, as Houseman knew, how many more peach seasons do we have?

Lazy Pie
Ruby Gibson’s Recipe
Melt one stick of butter in deep pan.
Sift together: 1 cup self-rising flour
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
pinch of salt (optional)

Mix with 2/3 cup of milk. Pour in pan on melted butter. Add 2 ½ cups sweetened fruit. DO NOT STIR. Bake 45 minutes on about 350 degrees.


I used butter milk, and added ¼ teaspoon soda. I only used ½ stick of butter. And my pan was a Pyrex two quart rectangular dish...you know, the medium sized one so you could have lots of buttery brown crust.

Peaches in Mississippi in the summer…

'Tis the Season

for SUMMER BREAKFAST

My fav---he eats a Mrs. Freshly's honeybun.

Facon (Morningstar veggie bacon) and tomato and basil sandwich using Mockingbird Bakery sourdough bread. Don't pass on the salt. Don't skimp on the mayonnaise.

Summer in Mississippi, ain't it grand?

Wishes to the Kitchen Genie

When the cooking is done, let me have only the cooking pots and serving spoons left to wash.

When eating’s done, let me clean up the kitchen immediately after.

That’s only two, right? I get one more?

Let my town get a great Thai restaurant. Now.

Kitchen Verity

So why is it that when I begin to cook lunch, and have the oil (Sizzle! Salt! Crunch!) heating on the stove, The-Little-Dog-With-The-Big-Bladder has to go outside RIGHT NOW!?

I am sure this is only true when you 1) don't have a fenced-in yard, and 2)never let The-Little-Dog-With-The-Big-Bladder outside without a leash. Otherwise, the Kitchen God must provide some other type of emergency that requires attention RIGHT NOW! to keep the cook juggling fire and on her toes.