My Dad's Terrible Cooking Showed His Love

My mom left us for the man who managed the produce department in our local grocery store when I was 5, but that is another story. As an afterthought, and because her friends told her about child support she got custody of me, after about 5 years of some intense custody battle I won and got to live with my dad. By then my two oldest siblings had moved out and it was just me and my brother who is 5 years older than me and my dad. To say that my dad was a bad cook is being generous.

Every weekday started exactly the same. I would wake up to my dad in the kitchen making oatmeal. To say that my dad is a bad singer is being generous. He sang with pure joy though. His songs were silly, off key and I never knew if they were real songs or if he made them up. As a grown up I went with my best friend to her great grandmother's funeral. At the grave side they said something about singing her favorite song. It was one of my dads silly songs that I always thought he had made up. It caught me funny and I started to giggle. Yes we are still best friends. My dad grew up on a 40 square mile ranch, and he was a logger. This serenade was really really early in the morning. When you heard it your best move was to get out of bed. If he had to come wake you up he came with a glass of very cold water.

Oatmeal was something he actually made very well. My oldest brother absolutely refuses to eat oatmeal to this day. Even good oatmeal can get to be a bit much 5 days a week. To this day oatmeal is one of my favorite things in the whole world. If I am feeling bad or low it is my go to comfort food. My plan was to fill up on the oatmeal because you never knew what you would get the rest of the day. On weekends we either had cold cereal, or he took the time to cook something more fancy. The cold cereal was always Rice Crispies, Cheerios or Corn Flakes. He didn't have anything against sugar he just believed in the classics I guess. You could put as much sugar on your cereal as you liked though.

When he tried to cook it could go either way really. Sometimes he would make pancakes. He made fairly ok pancakes, but he decided that we were wasting syrup. In his mind if there was any syrup left on your plate you were wasting syrup. So in order to keep us from wasting the syrup he started putting the "right" amount of syrup into the batter. We could only put butter on them. It was interesting, not bad really but interesting to eat maple flavored pancakes with just butter.

I know what you are thinking this doesn't really sound like terrible cooking. Here is an example of what he thought was totally acceptable. One summer Saturday my brother and I got up and he was cooking sausage patties and eggs. We were pretty chuffed to see a hot breakfast on a weekend. So we each filled our plates and sat down at the table. The eggs were just fine, he could not make them overeasy but he could cook eggs just fine. I honestly think that the bite of sausage was the worst thing I have ever eaten in my life, my brother agrees. And to say we ate it is not accurate. We took a bite and when we tasted it we immediately spit it out and looked for something to get the taste out of our mouths. Here is what happened before we got up. Dad started making breakfast and decided that there wasn't enough sausage for all of us. So he looked in the fridge and saw perch fillets from our recent fishing trip. For some reason I will never understand he owned a meat grinder. So he got out the meat grinder and ground up the perch and mixed it with the sausage. As we were desperately trying to get the taste out of our mouths and gagging he sat there calmly eating breakfast and explained to us that is was just filler and we better fill up it would be a long time to lunch.

Lunch depended on if it was summer or winter. In the winter I was in school and at that time where we lived if your parents worked for the state you got free hot lunch. My dad contracted for the Forrest Service as a logger and that counted, so I had free lunch. I know school lunch is often the thing people complain about having to eat. But for me it was an opportunity to fill up on "real" food.

If it was summertime as soon as our oatmeal breakfast was done we headed out the door to go to work. We would stop every day at the same gas station and get fuel for the truck and the saws and dad would buy the same things every day. We each got a coke, he bought a loaf of bread, a package of bologna and a bag of chips. At lunch time we would find a shady spot and eat sandwiches, chips and drink our coke. We had no condiments, which was probably for the best since we had no ice chest or anything, the bread and bologna just sat in the truck until lunch. The coke was either in the shade or in a creek if there was one. We also had a gallon of water. It was in a milk jug. We tried to keep it in the shade but it could be really bad in two ways. If you were in a hurry to clean out the milk jug and you either didn't get all the milk out or all the soap it was horrible. But if it is 90 degrees and you have actually been working you will drink the water. Not too long ago I got into my brothers car and we both had travel mugs that will keep your beverage of choice either hot or cold. I asked him what he would have given for one of those when our drinking water tasted of rotten milk. The answer was all the money we had at the time. Sometimes we would camp on the job sites if the job was really remote to save time and gas driving back and forth. Then he would add eggs to the groceries. We would have fried bologna and eggs. Honestly a totally edible meal, especially when your are hungry. Recently my dad said we had a charmed childhood, we had a picnic in the mountains every day. He wasn't wrong. I have incredible good memories of logging with my dad.

There were things he could make for dinner like fish. We did a lot of fishing and he was good at cooking fish. Fish is my oatmeal, I had so much of it I just don't like fish anymore. But not because he made it badly just because I had it so much.

Whenever there is a single dad there are always very well meaning women that try to help. I will have to say at this point that there were amazing women who had us over for meals and fed us regularly. I have such fond memories of those meals and cant say how grateful I am for their kindness and generosity. These kind well meaning women also tried to tell my dad how to cook the dishes that we enjoyed eating at their homes. One thing that sticks out in my memory is spaghetti. We all liked it and one of the very kind women told my dad how they made their sauce and they said that the secret was that they added a little sugar to their sauce to counter the acidity of the tomatoes. In retrospect I think it would have been more helpful to tell him that you could buy spaghetti sauce in jars. Anyway here is what my dad did with this information, And I should add that he made a pretty big deal of how he knew how to make spaghetti now and it was going to be really good. So he fried some hamburger, did not remove any of the grease. To that he added a can of Cambels condensed tomato soup, I kid you not and a cup of sugar. Even he thought that was not amazing when he put it on the noodles.

I will say there were a lot of meals I did not enjoy. But I have a lot of life experience to look back on those meals now. And I know that in 1978 when my parents got divorced dads very rarely got custody of the kids. I know he did not have to take care of 4 kids. As an adult I also have an understanding of what a five year custody battle costs. I know as an adult that my dad would work all day in the woods with us. Bring us home and cook us one of his terrible meals, play cards with us or monopoly then when we went to bed (just a reminder my brother was 15 or 16, we were not tiny children) then he would go haul logs to the mill all night. Take a little nap and then start the singing and the oatmeal. And while the food was not gourmet we never missed a meal. Our house was clean, our clothes were clean and we had a dad that loved us enough to do all that for us. All in all we had a good life.

As a side note, when my dad remarried my step mother was an amazing cook and we all gained at least 10 pounds immediately.

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