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Thursday Thirteen: meal memories from my childhood
I've been trying to approach this Thursday Thirteen meme as a way to give readers a glimpse into who I am, but thirteen is an awfully big number. I thought about "13 places I've lived," but I could only get there by counting each dorm room in college separately, as well as where I "lived" for a summer job and changing bedrooms within my childhood home.
I did, however, hit upon something that I suppose was a rather definitive feature of my childhood: the foods we ate. It goes a long way toward defining a family, doesn't it? What sorts of things does your family eat often? What are the old stand-by foods?
Now, I won't claim that this is entirely consistent over time: at times, we had food fads in our family. Some of these might even qualify. I'm going to look primarily at main dishes here, but I should point out that my mother worked very hard to have a variety of foods at every meal. I think we always had some kind of vegetable, which I always did my best to refuse. I was eventually required to eat at least one bite of everything. The vegetables were almost always from a can and cooked on the stove-top with butter. I'd like to maintain that that is why I didn't appreciate veggies, but at that age I probably wouldn't have liked garden-fresh organically-grown vegetables either. We always had a fruit as well. More often than not, the fruit was applesauce, because I loved apple sauce. When it wasn't, it was from a can and packaged in light syrup. The other consistent feature of my childhood was that we had dessert at every meal. My father would have eaten dessert first if given the option, I would have followed suit, but no, we were always restrained until the rest of the meal had been eaten. I could probably do a Thursday Thirteen just on the desserts we ate; in fact, go ahead and pencil me in for that for next week.
In the meantime, on to the main dishes!
1. A roast, cooked with potatoes, carrots, and onions. Okay, so we did have actual vegetables occasionally. This was our most common Sunday dinner (the noon meal, but since it was the big meal of the day, it was dinner). It would always be cooked well-done, but there was enough fat on it to redeem the flavor.
2. A surprisingly large number of steaks. Ribeyes, porterhouses, sirloins, T-bone steaks, round steak (and the dreaded cubed steak). My father's step-brother raised cattle, so we would fill a basement freezer with a half a cow at a time. Thus we got a wide variety of steak cuts which were generally of a better quality and cheaper than what we could have gotten at the store. Sometimes these would be Sunday dinner, sometimes just an evening meal. Usually served with mashed potatoes.
3. Breakfast food for Sunday supper. I see to remember every Sunday evening having pancakes or waffles (we had a waffle griddle) or French toast for supper. Very occasionally eggs and toast, but usually we were looking at bready breakfast foods: something that cries out for syrup. And we heeded the cries.
4. "Porcupine balls" Half a cow yields a lot of hamburger. One way we ate it was mixed with rice and some other things, with tomato soup over top of it. These were a family favorite--Mom still makes them when I go home.
5. Mashed potatoes and hamburger gravy. Isn't this self-explanatory? Homemade gravy of hamburger, onions, milk, and flour. This was more of a white gravy than a brown gravy.
6. Stew meat and dumplings. This is the only thing I can remember my mother using the pressure cooker for, but I'm fairly convinced there's no better way to eat stew meat than with big, fluffy dumplings. Sadly, I can't think when the last time was that I had this meal.
7. Meatloaf. It never seemed quite like anyone else's, though I can't pinpoint quite how it was different. It just was. When I was in high school, mom went through a phase of making hamloaf, with a mix of meat that one of the local grocers supplied. Meatloaf was just a sort of comfort food--ham-loaf was actually very tasty.
8. "Hollywood Chicken" This was one of my paternal grandmother's recipes, and it probably won't sound good, but it really was--or anyway, we sure liked it. Here's what I remember being in it: hamburger, chicken noodle soup, and potato chips on top. I think there was some flour in it making a sort of gravy. It was a heart attack in a casserole dish which, I suppose, tells you what its appeal was.
9. Pork chops. Nothing fancy here, just fried. For some reason, mom always used the electric skillet for these. For pancakes and French toast as well, come to think of it. What was it about that electric skillet?
10. Fried chicken. Mom would buy chicken parts, dust them up with flour, and pan-fry them. Sometimes we'd have chicken baked, but 9 times out of 10 it was fried.
11. Deep-fried fish. This was mostly a phase. We got a deep fryer and went to town. We used to go to some store that specialized in frozen fish. We bought Lake Erie perch for a while, and when that got too expensive we started getting some other fish that--when fried--seemed an awful lot like perch.
12. Baked Ham. Plain and simple; almost invariably served with sweet potatoes from a can. It wasn't until late in my childhood that we discovered sweet potato casseroles for those canned sweet potatoes. It wasn't until I was out of college that I discovered actual sweet potatoes.
13. Ham funeral. We must have made a habit of getting industrial-sized hams, because we always had a lot left over. When we got sick of ham by itself, Mom would make ham funeral, a casserole that was basically macaroni and cheese (home-made cheesiness, mind you) and ground-up ham. Delicious!
I've probably missed some, but these were the first 13 that came to mind. What were the staple foods of your childhood?