Strange Craving Combination

I remember exactly how old I was when lunch item crossed my plate.  I was six years old, in my first year of kindergarten, probably terrified of what the world had in store for me.  It was a time of joy and care free living, no bills, and no issues yet, no time for grown up ideals, just being a kid, what could be better?  Let me tell you.  At this point in the Longstreth house there were three children, an oldest Tami, a second Jo and the greatest son ever, me.  But trouble was on the horizon.  You see, as luck would have it, after having 5 ½ years of joyous living due to the fact that your perfect only son was brought into your life, Marie was pregnant.  We were going to have another sibling.  Why, I would ask, perfection has already crossed your door, I would need no other sibling in my life.  I already have two sisters who cannot see how great I will become.  This child will not have any chance; he or she will only have to be second best at everything after I leave my mark.  But I could not stop this.  This is going to happen and I am going to like it, says Hank and Marie.  We’ll see about that!

My mom is pregnant.  Many of you have siblings, younger or older, or children.  So when I tell you that most pregnant women have cravings comes to little or no surprise.  More times than not this would most generally be a combination of food that would not normally go together.  My hopes at this time is that maybe my mom would crave ice cream, see GICED posted 5/29, or even Ho Ho’s, a future post.  Here is the problem in my kitchen; how will I determine if what Marie makes and eats is a craving or is something she has seriously made for family consumption?  By even having this blog you can see my dilemma.  I haven’t read any research; could it be possible that as embryos our palates are created by the feeding behavior of our mothers during gestation?  Or could our tastes be programmed by the eating habits of our expectant mothers feeding rituals applied during pregnancy onto siblings outside the womb?  This adolescent period in our lives is a great developmental period.  In this case, I think it is the latter, because I get cravings as do most people.  Some of my yearnings can be solved with ice cream or something spicy or chocolate, even salty and crunchy.  I have one craving that cannot be solved by anything aforementioned.  It was a craving my mom had during the incubation of our fourth sibling, LOL, that’s funny!  Sorry Margo, but you weren’t born yet and incubation is funny!  I digress, back to the unsolved craving.  There are many combinations concerning one ingredient, peanut butter:  PB & J, PB & banana, PB & marshmallow.  All of which were conceived, no pun intended, by expecting mothers.  Why else would you ever even try such combinations?  I think my mom got this from her mom, believe it or not; Peanut butter and Pickle.  Not sweet pickle but dill pickles.  Mom and I would have these sandwiches together and later in life she would pack these in my lunch for school.  My friends would make fun of me for eating this combination but I would never forget the satisfaction each sandwich would bring.  Not even to this day; this amalgamation of ingredients will always bring back my then, six year old memories of fulfilling my pregnant mothers’ cravings. 

Here is the recipe:  two slices of soft sandwich bread, apply a thick layer of peanut butter to each slice.  This is important; because you do not want pickle juice soaked bread on one side.  If you can find them, dill pickle chips (hamburger slices), they used to call them, add a row of 3 across the top, middle and bottom of the peanut butter bread, 9 total, no more no less.  Top the pickled side of bread with the other, the craving solver can now be enjoyed.  Try this for your next craving and see if it works.  Maybe it will or maybe it won’t, but don’t knock it until you try it.

The Condiment Conspiracy

As you may have figured out by now I’ve been pretty hard on my mother’s cooking skill, or lack thereof.  It has been an issue for my culinary views and tastes since I have been a toddler.  Hopefully my mom didn’t try her hand at baby food.  Or did her ineptness actually start in the womb?  She will never let that cat out of the bag.  On a recent trip to Ohio, I had the opportunity to consult my sisters.  I say consult with reservation.  I should say asked my sisters about any memories from their past that I may have missed or was not around to taste.  Nothing came to their minds…really, nothing more to add?  This got me thinking.  What am I missing?  Did she only try to poison me, her only begotten son?  My head is spinning with doubt, confusion and contemplation.  Aha!  I am beginning to remember now.  My second eldest sister, Jo, must have figured this bad meal thing out early.  My oldest sister, Tami, I’m not sure about her palate just yet.  But Jo, she had it figured out early.  Memories of Jo eating meals lent me to this one conclusion:  My mom’s meals must have really sucked or I just didn’t have the nerve to pull the condiment thing off like my sister.  Quite possibly there is one sibling in every family who gets it.  The “it” I am speaking of, is covering up the bad taste with condiments.  I use the term condiment loosely.  Condiments in our house were very conventional, only the basics: mustard, mayo, extra salt, maybe some leftover relish from a past hot dog night.  Not sure why we had mayo, oh yes the tuna salad.  Yuck, it’s still haunting.  Hot sauce you may ask; are you kidding?  I didn’t even know they made hot sauce until I was about fourteen.  That would have given me cause to experiment, maybe even make Marie’s cooking tolerable, but back to my sister and her masterful preparation of choking down meals prepped by America’s worst cook.  She never let on to her secret, not even to this day.  Maybe she doesn’t even know she has a secret.  But I’m on to her.  It went like this: scrambled eggs w/ketchup, meatloaf w/ketchup, pot roast w/ketchup, hash browns w/ketchup, fried chicken w/ketchup, scalloped potatoes w/ketchup, tuna salad w/ketchup: you’re starting to get the picture now.  It has become very clear to me that Jo wasn’t even trying to hide the fact my mom’s cooking sucked.  Or I was too naive to see.  She put ketchup on everything!  What the hell could I have been doing?  I surely wasn’t paying attention.  The answer was there and Jo had it all the time.  Could it be possible my other sister Tami was sneaking hot sauce?  Son of a bitch, the pure neglect and abuse I have been put through just keeps coming.  Ketchup on everything was the answer to my mom’s cooking all along.  Nice going Jo.  You went through your childhood knowing Marie had zero culinary ability.  Damn it, how could I be so blind?  Lucky for your taste buds, mom kept you in supply.  I guess you deserve the ketchup; I still got the Hi-C Grape juice.  By the way, Tami, if you read this and you come clean with the hot sauce, I will know it was a conspiracy against me.  Jo with her ketchup and you with the hot sauce, always against the younger brother: I see how it works.  I think Jo has outgrown her ketchup thing but if you happen to get an invite to Marie’s for dinner, there will ketchup in the fridge for sure.  Enjoy! 

Cans Cans Cans

As summer comes to a close around the country, I begin to remember the cozy dishes from the Midwest.  It may occur to you that I have a complete disregard for canned peas.  The remainder of the year will be served to me from a can.  Canned peas, canned corn, canned green beans, canned pork and beans, well you get the picture here, there will be even further canned vegetables from my grandmother and her home canning process.  My family will consume nothing fresh until next August when the garden harvest resumes.  By the way, we have no garden!  My grandmother will have one and the vegetables from it will be canned for the winter.  She will can tomatoes, green beans, corn and cherries from her two cherry trees.  These trees of which I am only allowed to climb during harvest season, go figure.  Looking back and talking with co-workers and friends we speak of good and bad meals.  Just yesterday I was saying how there is nothing like the sweet corn of the Midwest.  This could be my favorite vegetable without question but only for a limited time.  Mid August to mid September, prime sweet corn picking time, if you pick or consume corn on the cob any other time of the year you are not getting what you pay for.  If you eat corn on the cob from any other area you are being robbed of the sweetest taste of corn you may ever eat.  As a kid I could pick an ear from the field, strip it down and eat it right there.  It was the sweetest tasting corn in the world.  My mom would boil some ears in a stock pot and I could eat 3 or 4 ears at one sitting.  The problem would be applying the butter, salt and pepper to the ears.  It wasn’t until later in life, I think my cousin Judy showed me the secret.  By using the end of a loaf of bread, which no one eats any way, place the butter in two rows on either end of the bread, stick your corn with skewers and roll on top of butter using the bread like a mitten to cradle the hot corn.  Roll the corn round and round until the melting goodness is dripping like a melting icicle.  Salt and pepper the corn and begin your best method of corn eating, side to side like the old typewriter method or around the cob systematically going from end to end.  Whichever your method, you will not be disappointed.  But until you have had the Midwest corn, all other corn will pale in comparison. No canned corn or even cut fresh and frozen corn will satisfy my late summer craving.  Thank goodness my mom couldn’t screw up boiling water.  Thanks mom, Midwest corn on the cob rules!  I give my humble apologies to those of you who have never had the pleasure of corn from corn country.  So if you non Midwesterners have good sweet corn, multiply that taste by 10 and then you have Midwest corn.

Memory Blocker

As I was trying to recall this dish of plenty, it occurred to me that I have no significant memory of this treat.  I am racking my brain, trying to resurrect some sort of hidden horror.  Nothing…what to do now?  I decide to go ahead and write like it will come to me and during the creative process trigger some memory of my past to share with everyone.  Still nothing…maybe this dish is so ghastly that my memory has been erased.  Maybe this dish is so terrible that even my brain cannot withstand the amount of energy it will take to recollect my past.  I do remember seeing this dish at many a picnic, graduation, pot luck dinner etc.  Yet to my dismay, I cannot put the pieces together to spark that day or night.  I am certain the day this dish hit my palate, it posed the worst combination of flavors known to mankind.  The dish most likely re-shaped my palate at that very second, to what I surmise today as edible.  This amalgamation of textures and flavors, not to mention the crossing of food group boundaries, which should never, ever be contained in the same bowl, was served proudly at many functions.  Why did we do this to my generation?  Or was it just me?  I will share with you to decide.  The dish I am speaking of is none other than Lime Jello with Vegetables.  WTF!  I need say nothing more:X  

Crap My Lips Will Never Touch Again

If you can imagine the horror and plight of my hatred for canned peas compounded with the sheer disgusting smell and taste of canned tuna, then welcome to the nightmare.  The bad dreams have been terrorizing me for the last 6 days.  Let me explain.

This one will begin with two of the most disgusting ingredients known to man, canned peas and canned tuna.  For my tastes this could not get any more horrifying.  See “Take Your Medicine” from November of last year.  There is just no use for canned peas.  Now if you recall back in May, my post of Odorous Pescado, my hatred of canned fish, you are going in the right direction.  I think just maybe canned tuna out ranks canned salmon.  I just thought again and it DOES out rank canned salmon for complete nastiness.  I can only recall eating canned tuna once in the very dish I am about to explain.  Once was enough!  Wait, once was too many.  Canned salmon patties were served numerous times in the Longstreth house.  But one day long ago, a fork, canned tuna and my mouth shared a very brief moment together.  That day, that moment changed my life forever.  When I smell canned tuna, I get that stomach wrenching, deep throated hurling, over activated saliva producing, eerie feeling of discomfort that comes with anguish and much fear.  Get away, my brain tells me.  But like a car wreck, I just have to get another whiff of vomit starter.  I can tell you for certain that I have no recipe for what is about to be unleashed.

The Tuna Noodle Casserole, you guessed it.  Why on earth is there any reason to create such a revolting dish?  What did I do?  Am I in trouble?  Are you serious with this?  What kind of mother comes to the table smiling carrying this?  Picture your mom as the grim reaper approaching with a casserole dish instead of the scythe, now that is a more realistic dramatization.

 As I sat down to watch fireworks on July 4^th, a lady of similar age to me was eating a bag of kettle corn.  I asked if she would like to try my bag of homemade caramel corn, she said no but her daughter agreed to try and loved it.  I explained to her daughter that if she read my blog she could get the recipe for Marie’s Caramel Corn, thank you mom for the recipe.  But as we began talking, this lady (also from the Midwest) began telling me about her bad meals.  Bam!  She said it out loud!  “Did you ever have the Tuna Casserole with the canned peas, canned tuna and smashed potato chips on top?”  WTF, I began sweating, my mouth salivating (the bad way) this conversation had taken a turn for the worst.  I listened to what she had to say but the entire time I was in fear.  Fear that somewhere around the corner that grim reaper looking mother was coming with a Pyrex baking dish full of putrid tuna and soggy peas for only me to consume.  I was near panic and tried to change the subject as to why the potato chips were used.  Neither of us could come to any logical conclusion.  My thought for the chips was to make it appealing to young children.  What kid doesn’t like chips?  And what family doesn’t have a partial bag of broken chips in the cupboard?  Logically you put them on top of something you want to hide.  Mix in a bag of noodles and it sure sounds delicious.  Whatever!  I stopped talking to the lady behind me, she’s scary, and I think she saw the fear on my face and got a kick out of frightening me.  I quickly polished off my bag of caramel corn and continued fretting about the casserole.  I wondered what the sauce was holding together this weapon of mass of destruction.  Why do I have a frozen container of this in my freezer?  I didn’t buy it, where did it come from?  Is someone trying to kill me?  I have no answers for the sauce and will never be able to tell you what makes this dish so yummy.  But I do know this. I know what makes it revolting.  If you mix canned peas and tuna together and think about bringing it to my house, think again brothers and sisters.  You, my friends, are not welcome.  Come back and try again with the following recipe.

 Caramel Corn Recipe:  16cups of popped corn (please pop your own corn, it makes the recipe), 1 stick of margarine (I used butter), 1 cup of brown sugar, ¼ cup Corn syrup, ½ teaspoon of salt and baking soda.  In a sauce pan combine margarine, sugar, corn syrup and salt, bring to a boil and continue for boiling for exactly 3 minutes.  Remove from heat and add baking soda, mix thoroughly and pour over cooked corn, mix to combine and place on sheet pans to bake for 5-10 min @ 200°.  Break up clumps and enjoy.  Caution it is hot.  I added some coarse salt to mine and wow what a difference.  Sorry Mom, I just had to change it a little.

Sunday Morning Biscnuts

What the hell?  Let me inform you again that my ancestors are German/Pennsylvania Dutch.  So I can eat me some noodles, pastries, strudel, etc.  Who would believe that my palate would not recognize my family’s   homemade donuts?  Some Sunday mornings my mom would rev up the electric skillet.  What?  Didn’t every home have an electric skillet?  How did you survive?  This electrical gadget was my mom’s microwave, which hadn’t been invented yet.  She would turn that baby on to the magic number, 350°, scoop out some Crisco shortening and place into the electric cook all.  Once the shortening had melted and was brought to temperature, the fun was just about to commence.  This procedure was a family affair.  Yes I said family affair, 3 young children, scalding hot fat and a pair of tongs that didn’t close squarely, a used brown paper grocery bag and two other lunch size paper bags with sugar and powdered sugar respectively.  Let the child abuse begin.  The dough; are you prepared for this, one cylindrical tube of…biscuits!  Yes I mean the Pillsbury prepared dough miniature hockey pucks.  I remind you this was the 70’s there were no jumbo, buttermilk, only the standard small size.  I remember there being about 10 discs of dough in each package.  So this means someone in the family was getting shorted.  I was the youngest at the time so guess who?  Now the preparation:  my mother would have us take an empty, sanitarily rinsed with hot tap water, pop bottle, remember those.  My sisters and I would take turns pushing this pop bottle through the center of each disc of dough, thus creating the donut.  The best part was the treasure inside the bottle, the donut hole!  Once this production was completed each dough puck went into the hot fat, flipping half way through the cooking.  The fully golden brown donuts would then be placed on the folded, brown paper grocery bag to drain.  We would then place 2-3 hot donuts into the lunch bag of sugar, shake and eat.  The donut holes cooked very quickly and were bite size nuggets of goodness.  This was my revenge for being youngest.  I would always be the one to shake the sugar on the donut holes.  Thus being the one to dig them out of the sugar.  I would eat as many donut holes I could get away with leaving my sisters to enjoy nothing but the donuts.  I’m guessing we weren’t the only family eating these.  This suggestion of making donuts out of biscuit dough probably dates back to ancient times.  Now we cut the prep time in half by using prepared dough and the electric cook all.  I remember these Sunday mornings as being good times.  I haven’t tried to replicate this memory because of Top Pot, Krispy Crème and the likes.  They do a much better job with the donut than any biscuit dough you can find.  But feel free to treat your family to these Crisco laden, sugar covered biscnuts. 

GDIC, Say What?

As I see it in present day, I have a problem.  I love Ice Cream, I have GICED.  Never in my adult life have I ever refused a serving of ice cream.  I could be just finishing 6 or 7 tacos and still ask my daughter  ”do you want to go to Dairy Queen?”  Off we go and I polish off a medium blizzard without a problem.  I can only assume, like any adult with a problem, affliction or addiction, I can trace this back to my childhood and my parents.  Yup, I blame them.  They are responsible for my Genetic Ice Cream Eating Disorder.  I dare tell you why. 

My father, Hank also loves his ice cream.  It is now out; the Longstreth gene pool is responsible.  He would eat a bowl of ice cream on a regular basis.  I know what you are thinking, but hear me out, I wasn’t really that spoiled.  My dad would come up with some of the weirdest concoctions with ice cream that I ever saw.  Root beer floats with Pepsi.  I was 4 or 5 years old & I didn't really understand, but man were they good.  No root beer or Pepsi?  No problem, just use the Hi-C grape; there is always some of that in the fridge.  Vanilla scoops, with chocolate syrup topped with Spanish peanuts, aka The Tin Roof, a father and son personal favorite.  There is something to be said about the sweet and salty goodness with that ice cream sundae.  Although I was never allowed to stir my bowl of ice cream, somehow the very bottom of the bowl always was mixed to a smooth texture.  The local ice cream place was somewhere I dreamed about.  I fondly remember Hank introducing me to the wicked, gooey, warm goodness of hot fudge.  He introduced me to the Fudgesicle and the Drumstick.  Baskin Robbins was always a treat and I saved my fruity side of the palate for the BR Orange Sherbet in a cup.  My pet peeve; the pronunciation of the word SHER BET, for those of you who believe your ears and not your eyes there is only ONE R in the word SHER BET.  That’s enough of the English class.  My next memory was the chocolate malt.  I can drink a chocolate malt in about 45 seconds, therefore I now keep some malted milk in my pantry for the after dinner dessert malt.  My current addiction to this frozen confection has been perpetually fueled throughout my child hood.  My need for ice cream with toppings is beyond compare.  Oh, I forgot to mention we only had vanilla, thus the need for toppings or added flavors to choke it down.  Are you very confused yet?  Here’s the deal breaker.  Marie didn’t buy ice cream.  Frozen yogurt hadn’t been invented yet and we didn’t have an ice cream soft serve in the kitchen.  Nope, Marie proudly purchased ICE MILK!  That’s right, I said ICE MILK, it wasn’t even ice cream.  Now it all makes sense, the need for additional flavors and my addiction to the real thing.  I know every Cold Stone location in my area, Dairy Queens and local mom and pop frozen confections.  I love Ben and Jerry’s, Dreyers, fudgesicles, Klondike bars, drum sticks, chocolate, neopolitan, malt cups, and for my favorite combination Wendy’s fries dipped in the chocolate frosty, life could not get better than that.  I think the ice cream gene has been passed to my daughter.  She shares the same passion as I for this frozen delicacy.  There is one small difference, she knows when to stop.  Hopefully she will pass this genetic trait to her offspring.  If you happen to find ICE MILK in your local grocery, pick up a half gallon and bring it home proudly.  Don’t forget to get something to put on top because you won’t be able to eat it otherwise.