What's On the Menu at My Mother's House

Not on the Menu challenge: The Prompt - Write about something memorable you ate that you'd never find on a restaurant menu.

Not every unforgettable meal comes with a reservation.

Maybe it was something your grandmother made without a recipe, a questionable combination you invented as a kid, a snack discovered halfway across the world, or a meal thrown together from whatever happened to be left in the fridge. It might have been incredible. It might have been terrible. You might still be trying to figure out what was actually in it.

For this challenge, write about something you ate that you'd never expect to see on a restaurant menu. Tell us what it was, where you were, who was there, and why you still remember it.

The food doesn't have to be fancy or even particularly good. It just has to come with a story.

My mother was a baker. She baked bread weekly, that included buns, loafs, and cinnamon or caramel rolls. And she was well-known in the family for her pies. Family and friends would always order pies for different holidays and many different occasions.

When she died, I put together a cookbook with some of her recipes for a memorial gift. Giveaways were common in our family at memorial times. Some families gathered items all year long for just such a giveaway. We had some of that too, but the most cherished item was the cookbook with mom's recipes.

Mom did not make her pies for a restaurant, or they weren't on the menu of any place that I visited in my lifetime. But I had plenty of experience with mom's pies in my lifetime. Probably about 55 years. The comments came in about the recipe book and one recipe had some special notes that I didn't expect.

Betty Christ wrote, "Both Barry and I have been so grateful to have the first edition cookbook. We treasure it! Ione's Sour Cream Raisin Pie is a favorite!!!!!!!"

Then Juanita Espinosa wrote, "I miss your mom, and I especially remember the Thanksgiving she made us all pies."

And a close friend Rose Robinson wrote, "I really enjoy the recipes in the cookbook you gave me. I think of your mom and Carrie whenever I use the recipes."

My mom died in 2009, and my sister in 2020.

My mom was always a good cook and we would smell baked goods coming through the door when we would get home from school. Always a treat. But sometimes there would be something cooking on the stove or in the oven.

In the oven there may be a muskrat baking. It looked just like a rat. That would not be on any menu I have ever read. Or there would be fish heads cooking on the top of the stove. Again, not anything I have seen on a menu. My mom loved this food, and sometimes she was the only one to eat it.

She would describe it as a delicacy. And the eyeballs were good. I tasted them, but I wouldn't go that far to say that. My mom ate bone marrow too. She always ate what was put in front of her and appeared to have no problem with cooking and serving lutefisk.

Yearly we would have a plate of smelt, and a plate of morrells on the table when we got home from school. My mom would fix everything others brought by. Many times it was in exchange for a pie or bread. Most things that we ate as kids wouldn't have been on any menu.

My mother would save small portions of left over oatmeal, to fix with her left over potatoes. She would add onions, and other seasonings, and any left over meat in the refrigerator, and that would be a meal.

I really didn't think that others weren't doing the same thing, until as a teen when I spent time with friends families. Meat and potatoes were real common, and hamburger hotdishes. And other things you would find on a restaurant menu.

We would have southwest chili, without beans, and little meat. Then we would have hominy soup, and a bit of the hot southwest chili would be added to the hominy soup. My sister brought that idea home from New Mexico with her on one of her trips home, along with the peppers, and hominy.

The hominy would pay for her trip, as she would get it for pennies (her words) in New Mexico and charge a cheaper price than you could get it for in Minnesota. It would pay for her trip to Minnesota and back to New Mexico.

My sister went to 4 years of school in New Mexico and married a man there and they had their two children, before coming home to Minnesota. My sister was a great cook and baker. She took after my mother. I can cook, I choose not to most of the times. I married two cooks.

My current husbands' folks owned a bar and restaurant, and he could eat all the cheeseburgers, fries and malts he wanted. He is fussy. I don't eat like him. And he doesn't eat like me, so most of the time, except for a breakfast meal at dinner, we don't eat the same foods. It is A-okay with both of us.

We can sit down at the same time and enjoy whatever we have put together for ourselves. Most of the foods we eat are not on a restaurant menu either. He ate Dinty Moore and a malt, for dinner last night, while I ate carrots, tomatoes, cottage cheese, and a protein bar.

Hubby got used to eating packaged foods when he was between wives, and he prefers some of the things he got used to eating. Most of it is a meat and potato meal, even though he prefers Dinty Moore and corned beef hash over pot roast.

To me, that sounds horrible, just like my meals don't sound good to him either. As I was eating raw carrots, he did say how he likes carrots and maybe we should have juicies again. Made out of carrots, apples, greens, and water/cream. Always what is on hand.

They are tasty, and just right. Again, not something on the menu anywhere. So, it was quite easy to put together a story on how the food I have eaten is not on most menus of the places I/we frequent. Hubby's favorite is DQ, and mine is any restaurant I can talk him into.