Whose Up For Supper

Whose Up For Supper

How would you like some bull head caught right out of a stream that ran just off my grandfather's land, or home made pizza that had homemade spaghetti sauce for the foundation of one of the best pizza's in my days growing up? How would you like some EEL...Yes I said eel for dinner or a green grape pie for dessert?

My mom invented all of this stuff! She could be a great cook when she wanted to. But she could also be a very bad cook when she wanted to. I remember some of the meals that she used to feed us. One that she was really good at and was a regular in our house was burnt hotdogs. And not just any hotdog, but those nasty pink Pilgrim Hotdogs. They were the worst but probably the cheapest and that is why we had them alot. We were poor and I was probably lucky that we weren't being fed opossum or squirrel.

Mom liked to burn alot of food. It's almost like she made it a point to see just how WELL done she could get some of the stuff. Emphasis on STUFF because after she was done with it, you had to guess what it started out as. Mom had this saying when we used to say it was burnt, she would say, "It's well done". And she meant it! Like she was so proud of the way she cooked it!

There were some really great meals that mom could make. The first really good food I remember my mom make was homemade bread. Oh, I loved that smell of fresh bread that filled our little house. We never bought bread from the store. Packaged bread was something we could not afford, so mom made her yummy homemade bread. I would have to beg her to cut into a fresh loaf of bread so that we could enjoy that warm, almost too hot to handle, but I made a great effort to taste that warm melting butter oozing down my chin as I took as big a mouthful of that softness that seeped of this rich warm liquid called butter, out of each nook and cranny that that mouthful could hold!

Once dad brought home an eel, yes I said EEL, to eat. He had gone fishing where he always liked to fish across from my grampa's house. He would take off nights and just go down and fish. I loved bullhead nights! He had mom fry up the bullhead and we ate it. We pretty much had to eat what we were being fed or we would go without. Some meals were good in that respect, but in others it was torture. So yes I ate eel. It tasted very, and I mean very fishy. I could only take a couple of bites. I think on the second bite I had had about enough. But the bullhead he caught were so good! Mom wasn't very good at cleaning the fish so we always had to watch out for bones. Yes very boney. That was scary eating, but really good. Lucky none of us ever choked on a bone.

We always had homemade pizza night with our homemade onion rings. That was a real treat for us! We would invite Aunts and Uncles over and watch homemade movies that my dad made when I was first born. The pizzas were so delicious! Dad always bought the crusts and mom would top it with her homemade spaghetti sauce, which I do not have the recipe for because I was never allowed to have it. That spaghetti sauce was like no other I have ever tasted in my life. And to this day, I still have not tasted that same taste as what mom used to make. And I'm not allowed to have that recipe.

Dad came home from the farmers market one day carrying a sack full of these big, plump, beautiful green grapes that looked like they were bursting with fresh juiciness. He told mom to make something with these. Well, mom thought he said to make a pie with these! Soooooo....mom made a green grape pie with those grapes that dad had brought home. That night we had a green grape pie and everyone would agree that it was thee best great green grape pie that we had ever had. That was a sweet day! Too say the least.

That spaghetti recipe is still out there somewhere and I hope to find it before I pass from this world. But some of those tastes will always remain inside of me no matter how hard I try to forget. I am just happy that I have a choice today in what goes into my mouth.