The Baboon Congress

Iron Chef or Iron Stomach?

108 Comments

Guest Blog by Joanne in Big Lake

Growing up in a large family comprised of 6 girls and 1 boy, each of us has a dish that qualifies as a catastrophe for our initial forays into cooking for the family. My specialty started innocently enough. As I was the only child in public middle school while my siblings were still in the Catholic school system, I was home first. It seemed like a reasonable and grown up thing to start supper since Mom had started working fulltime by now.

My mother’s cooking consisted mainly of bland meat, overcooked frozen vegetables and plain boiled potatoes every supper, which just seemed sooo blah, I wanted to try something different. She was a wonderful, gracious, loving mother in so many ways, but the woman could not cook.

Pork chops came in big packages and they seemed fairly easy to prepare. Searching through all the exotic spices in the cupboard, I would read “good on pork” and slather that spice on the chops. Well, if a little is good, more is better, right? After exhausting all the spices that were “good on pork,” I proceeded to cook the chops as my mother had done.

After serving this inspired, savory dish to my family on several occasions, I was dismayed to learn that I was banned from the kitchen, much to my shame and dishonor. I still like to think of my special pork chops as a precursor to Cajun blackened meats cuisine – but whom am I kidding?

My other sisters’ flops included Apple Boilover, Bird a la Grease, Cake Catastrophe and others. Not to mention some of my mother’s signature bad items. Pie Crust. She made the worst piecrusts ever, but she continued to make them by hand. The extra dough she would give to us kids to play with, so we made extra special “cookie” treats for our dear father. We rolled them up with our dirty hands, decorated them heavily with Christmas toppings and presented these treasures to our father (because we wouldn’t eat them). My father, God bless him, had a stomach of iron and ate anything put in front of him. He would eat those horrible pie dough cookies (with lots of coffee as I recall), as well as anything else Mom or us girls served up. The man was a saint in that regard.

Nowadays, I can cook a decent, simple meal following a recipe. My siblings are all quite good cooks now. The oldest sister is a truly outstanding cook and does occasional catering. Cathy jokingly says that she learned to cook out of self-defense. My mother evolved into a much better cook without having to feed 7 kids on a shoestring budget everyday, but she was still a high heat cook. I never knew what eggs sunny side up was like until I met my husband (whose mother was a great cook). I guess I never recovered from my first flop and am still not confident in the kitchen.

Share your first memorable cooking catastrophe or culinary masterpiece.

108 thoughts on “Iron Chef or Iron Stomach?”

  1. Morning all! Joanne… what a great story! I do want to hear about “Apple Boilover” someday.

    Although I am a good cook now, I never learned to cook from my mother. That’s because she never learned to cook from HER mother. My grandfather was an exacting, not-very-flexible individual; as my mom grew up, they had only seven meals… and always on the same day of the week. Mondays was Liver & Onions, Tuesday was Salmon Patties, etc. etc. Saturday was Hamburgers and French Fries. So my mom didn’t know how to cook and when I became a vegetarian in high school, it just compounded the problem. She did give me a copy of “Joy of Cooking” when I got married.

    Fast forward a year into my young marriage. I had a vegetarian cookbook and we were making a new recipe w/ pumpkin and vegetables and cheese. I had never cooked pumpkin in my life so looked it up in “Joy of Cooking”. There was the cut-it- in-half-and-bake-it-and-scrap-it method and there was a second method – cutting up the pumpkin into chunks and boiling it. This seemed much simpler and straight forward to me. So I boiled the pumpkin chunks and them dumped them in w/ the other veggies and cheese. If you’ve never eaten boiled pumpkin, I’m not recommending it here. The story would end here if it weren’t for my beyond frugal husband, who couldn’t bear the thought of throwing out the entire hotdish and wasting the veggies and cheese. He put the whole mess in a colander in the sink and squeezed the boiled pumpkin out (I actually have a photo of this in an album somewhere). Although it was edible after the exorcism of the pumpkin, it certainly wasn’t good. Suffice it to say, I have baked and scraped pumpkin and squash every time since then.

    Have a great day everyone!

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      1. My mother pressure cooked a lot of things, from her canning life. She presured-cooked her squash for pie, and, as I said, the squash filling of her pumpkin-really-squash pie was very good.
        Pressure cooking was the secret of her very good chicken and dumplings, pressured-cooked old hen as the base.

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      2. My mother loved her pressure cooker, too, but it was unrequited love that the cooker did not return. Everyone in our family remembered the famous bean soup explosion when Mom blew the top off the cooker with so much force it could have killed someone. The ceilings were tall in that old Victorian home, but the Presto blew so hard it decorated the kitchen ceiling with beans, and it took Mom a long time to figure out how to get them off.

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      3. i am looking at the ceiling in my kitchen now. the white rice from the pressure cooker explosion is still there. hardly noticable

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      4. My dad likes to tell about the time when his dad, in the 1930’s, was making homemade hooch in the kitchen when it exploded. I guess my grandmother was pretty upset and made my grandfather clean it up himself.

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      5. I believe this is why my mother never had a pressure cooker that I know of, and so, neither do I.

        Those chicken and dumplings (made with a REAL chicken no doubt) sound mightly good though.

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  2. Rise and Shine Babooners:

    Why do I think that Mouth-watering descriptions of deliciousness may not be the order of the day! Sherrilee, the pumpkin concoction sounds TERRIBLE! and FUNNY.

    I started to learn to cook at a very young age–around 8 and 9 years old. My father had become ill and could not work so my mother returned to work to support the family. She was often exhausted in the evening, so she and her mother taught me to cook so I could help her with this in the evenings after school. She did not know how to cook as a young bride, so her mother-in-law, a fabulous cook, taught her how to cook. Mom taught me many recipes from dad’s mom as a result. So I’ve known how to cook for a long time. I love to eat, I am a good cook, but I really don’t like the 5 days per week drudgery of cooking. I do love to cook the Thanksgiving meal.

    I had to learn to make coffee for my dad with an antique and dangerous drip coffeemaker that involved boiling water then deftly pouring the boiling water into the pool without burning one’s self and rapidly placing the pool on top of the bottom pot again. I burned myself a few times and then got the hang of it. I could never remember that mom would store baked goods in the oven and not tell anyone. So I would chronically forget to look in the oven, turn it to bake cookies, a cake, or casserole then smell something terrible as the heating oven burned the waxed paper, plastic wrap, or aluminum foil covering the top of the cake, the brownies, or whatever was there. Smoke would roll out of the oven.

    I’ve taught my husband to cook a bit, at his request. But he thinks of a recipe as a “formula” and I think of a recipe as a “suggestion.” He does not like to take the time to just hang out in the kitchen with me (like I did with Grandma) and learn to cook through osmosis, ongoing verbal patter and commentary, so my methods of “let’s try a little of this and see what happens” seem to him to be dangerous ad libs which make no sense.

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    1. Husband thinks of a recipe as “some arrogant fool’s ranting”; we have had some very interesting meals when he cooks. To his credit, though, he is much more creative than I, and does make some things that I (recipe fool that I am) wish we could replicate, but of course there’s nothing written down!

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  3. oh, Joanne, this will be fun reading! thanks for the vivid image of you making your first pork chops! ha, ha! and for your courage to confess. Julia always said NOT to tell if you had a failure. but i always think people will know anyway, right? might as well be up front about it.
    my Steve has always thanked me for a meal and said it is good. once he didn’t. i was a TA for a foods class and that day the students were tasting some of the awful things recommended for special diets – like Butter Buds (add water to these dry things and use like butter).
    i had a bunch of butter buds left after class and in a hurry at home i made
    packaged mac and cheese (first offense) made with leftover butter buds instead of butter (second offense) and then added frozen peas (third offense). Steve said “this is the worst food i have ever had” and refused to eat it. ha, ha!
    but the really worst food was (this time of year brings back this memory) the cornflake stuffing our friends made with their turkey. i think the recipe was:
    cornflakes
    corn oil
    period.
    we thought this was a New Jersey tradition or something and really tried to eat it but it was sooooo bad. greasy and crunchy. i asked if this was a family recipe and my friend said “oh no – we just didn’t know how to make stuffing so we just threw some things together that sounded good.” to each his own.
    thanks, Joanne – and a gracious good morning to You All.

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  4. Thanks for the memories. Nicely done. My mother, too, was a rather poor cook and did overcook. My brother-in-law says that she overcooked the salt. She was best with poor people food, such as an old stewing hen. She could fry chicken, but who can’t when you just killed the chicken or else froze it quickly after butchering. And she made very good pumpkin pie made from squash, except for the crust. Same crust as your mother, Joanne.
    After 20 years of marriage my wife gave me a book called “His Turn to Cook.” I quickly became a better cook than her, but do not tell her I said so, which she always tells everyone else, but I always deny.
    My best disaster came from my over-controlling daughter, who got those genes from my sister, who runs everything. One of my best dishes is what we call potato pancakes but they are not the pale things you get at Perkins; these are more like Lahtkes (I would love to specialize in Jewish foods, love them all; love cooking those I know). The recipe calls for 2-3 pounds of coursely grated potatos, salt/pepper, couple of eggs, and then a small amount of flour. My then 18 year old daughter (I would love to say it was her over-zealous youth that caused this , but she would still do this today.) decided to reorganize our kitchen without telling us; she did make it more logical, but then logic has little to do with my wife’s Russian mind, the one that managed and still manages our kitchen. My daughter decided that the small cannister my wife used for flour (it was too small) was better suited for powdered sugar. So take it from there folks. Very sweetly carmelized shredded potaotes and eggs fried in an inch of oil does not taste good.

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    1. Great, Clyde! And I can identify. One of the men I nearly killed with my chicken was a fellow with cookish pretensions. He once made chocolate mousse for everyone staying at a mutual friends’ cabin. He didn’t detect that our hostess, Elinor, used her sugar cannister for storing her salt. All you need to do to spoil chocolate mousse, we learned, is that one substitution of salt for sugar. Even my dog wouldn’t eat it.

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      4. Here’s my chocolate mousse recipe (taken many years ago from a NY Times cookbook – I think Craig Claiborne was the author) – I originally made this one and one of the more traditional variety with cream as a taste test…this one won. 🙂

        4 oz unsweetened chocolate
        3/4 c sugar
        1/4 c water
        5 eggs, separated
        1 tsp vanilla (or 1 tbl cognac or 2 tbl sherry…or “enough” of whatever your favored “adult flavoring” is…)

        Combine chocolate, sugar and water in the top of a double boiler, heat until chocolate has melted (stir, to keep it smooth). Then add egg yolks, one at a time, while still over the double boiler, beating hard after each. Remove mixture from water and allow to cool while beating the egg whites stiff. Fold egg whites into mixture and then add flavoring. Turn mixture into a bowl (or individual custard cups) and let stand in the refrigerator for 12 hours.

        The 12 hour wait is probably the hardest part of the recipe…I’m not patient when it comes to chocolate. But this is so worth it. Also, given what we know about uncooked eggs, you may want to use pasteurized eggs, lest you wind up like Steve, in search of a WC hidden in a basement…

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  5. I have already shared my recipe–and it was totally my personal invention, back when I was learning to cook–for the dish we later named “Steve’s Lethal Chicken.” For those few of you who do not memorize all my posts, here it is again. I decided that cooking chicken “low and slow” would maximum tenderness. I put chicken pieces in an electric skillet with half a bottle of Mazola oil, setting the temperature dial to 200. Then I let that simmer and soak all day, which guaranteed that the chicken would absorb all of the oil. Three vigorous young men ate that chicken, then slugged down Pepto Bismal and spent the rest of the evening on their beds moaning. I only made it once.

    Kathe (the ex) and I once got into “Camp Coffee.” That’s coffee you make by boiling grounds in water, clarifying the final product (slightly) by throwing in egg shells. Kathe decided eggs don’t go bad if chilled, so she began storing broken egg shells from our meals in the fridge. One day I made Camp Coffee, using six egg shells that had been stored for weeks. And then I went Christmas shopping.

    Of course, I had food-poisoned myself. My tummy began to boil and vent in Mount Saint Helens mode. The longest walk of my life was the trip from Daytons to the basement Men’s Room (gee, they hide those things well!) at Rosedale. (And Garrison says that Powdermilk Biscuits are expeditious!)

    What a way to wish everyone a glorious Thanksgiving Day and T-Day meal!

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      2. Jacque, I would like to make this for a Scandanavian Christmas buffet, and my memory of doing it for funerals when I was in high school has gone fuzzy. Isn’t the actual egg also involved and is there a way to make a quantity of it in one of those big old coffee urns? (no saved egg shells for me, thank you-those go into the compost after being well crushed).

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  6. I have memory of a friend and I attempting to make baklava during my high school years. I had learned some good, basic baking from my mother (though admittedly, her answer to good pie crust was, “go to the refrigerated section at the grocery store…buy the red box…unfold…” – a method I continue to use as I am a lousy pie crust baker, like Joanne’s mom). So there my pal Andrea and I stood at the counter. We had received instructions from our friend Julia, who was really good at baklava (but was not there) – but even with Julia’s instructions and the information on the phyllo dough box, we still wound up with globs of phyllo stuck together, not nice, thin layers. We did our best, through our giggles and occasional swearing, to get thin globs of phyllo to layer with the other ingredients. We did wind up with something that *tasted* like baklava, but the texture and appearance left more than a little to be desired. She and I still check in to see if this is going to be “another baklava” before we bake together (we have both avoided it since and have pretty good at other things).

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  7. A last word about Sandra-logic (my wife): my wife’s hobby is decorating. So our kitchen is arranged more by appearance and the logic of design. For instance, the sale and pepper can be found in three places–all with the dishes that go with the shakers they are in. Our pantry has more to do with color I think than purpose. The spices are arranged in the pantry for appearance, so the ones I use often are in the back and have to be dug out (she thinks spices are the unused stuff in those pretty Pency’s containers). Then she regularly rearranges things, as she does her accents around the house. Combine that with the fact that I do not have a uterus (Rosanne Barr says that men think a uterus is a lost-object-seeking-device), cooking is often for me a treasure hunt.

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    1. Having made fun of my wife, I have to tell you how courageous she is, day-by-day, moment-by-moment. She seldom lets her lupus and arthritis stop her from doing what she loves. She has, out of need, surrendered to me the mopping and vaccuuming, doing the bathrooms, etc. She still does most of the laundry, but will soon give that up to. She does iron and does dust because then she can rearrange accents.
      I put up the tree for her as always. She then spent about 6 hours decorating it. At the end, she was in terrible shape and admitted that this will be the last time she will be able to do it. But then told me it was worth it, she had a wonderful time just doing it as well as remembering the history of some of the decorations.
      Now, back to the funny stories.

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      1. I’ve already been inspired by what you’ve written about Marguerite (is that right? ), Clyde, and now am again. Thanks for telling us about her.

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      3. meeting your wife was a delight last week when i came down to pick up the tools (how did your winter weekend sale go) . she is a very gracious lady and you home was decorated beautifully. nice to meet you too face to face. i imagine the tree is beautiful judging from her decorating prowess.

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  8. Morning!

    My Mom was a good cook, but then again it was all fairly plain as well. Lots of boiled potatoes and hamburger. (I still kind of like peeling and cutting up potatoes… and eating a raw slice too.) With those spam Foxburgers on Sunday. And we would have complained if she did anything much different from that. She made lots of cookies / bars / cakes (I thought chocolate chip cookie bars were normal). Refrigerator cheese cake is still my birthday cake and she’ll still make it for me. Good thing because for some reason I haven’t learned and my wife is missing something about the recipe….
    Sometimes Mom would make something like Tuna and peas in a white sauce and you put it over toast. That was always good and I liked it but it was rare. I think Tuna was expensive…
    As I got older Mom went back to work and I made lunch for me and Dad. Usually french toast. Made a LOT of french toast. On white Wonder Bread of course.
    Hard to have disasters when you’re doing something that plain…
    I did once mix up a batch of sugar and cinnamon for toast but used salt…. I think Mom eventually had to throw that out.

    I have an iron stomach in regard to experation dates. When Kelly says ‘This is old; we need to throw it out’, that’s my cue to have it for lunch the next day. Makes Kelly crazy… (mind you- not moldy or anything… just ‘old’.)
    I once opened a pudding cup and started eating without really looking… the top was moldy. That was gross….

    I am happy to say I took today off from work at the college. Woo Hoo! And the kids are off school… meeting my wife and Mom -in-law for lunch, to tie it into ‘Food’ and we’re heading to a long weekend already.

    Keep a weather eye today!

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    1. Love raw potato. My wife thinks food goes bad right after it is cooked. Expiration dates are a mere suggestion, written by moicidal idiots trying to kill us all. I attribute this to her Russiand heritage. Russians have a thing about cleanliness. It is not next to Godliness; it IS Godliness.

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      2. Be careful eating raw potatoes. Raw potatoes can sometimes be poisonous. The poison that can sometimes be found in raw potatoes is destroyed by cooking. Potatoes that have green skin from being exposed to the light are poisonous if eaten raw and I think raw potato sprouts are also poisonous.

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    2. my father in law grew up on a farm in central illinios and has the art of country cooking down pat. he came form a family of 7 boys a one girl and the other boys took care of the chores and he liked to stay in with his mom and do indoor chores including cooking. his pot roast with potato carrots and onions in a favorite of my kids. plain old cooing without getting overly concerned with spices and presentation is the way he does it. life can be easy i hear.

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  9. Love your story, Joanne, what a fun topic for the most potential day of disaster. I’m sure I’ll think of others later, but one colossal failure was some cornbread where I must have left out the baking soda — we could call it cornbrick, I guess.

    I took science in 8th grade instead of home-ec, and my mom, who was a good enough traditional a la Betty Crocker cook, taught me only scrambled eggs and “goulash” – macaroni-hamburger-tomato in the skillet. But I consider myself lucky to have been around when cooking went multi-cultural. I love trying out all the different flavors, abd usually use a recipe the first time, anyway.

    Now to read the rest of yesterday. Glad I came early and don’t have to travel the roads today. Happy Preparations, everyone.

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    1. That was my title. I’m proud to say Dale didn’t have to do any editing to my piece. Having written a couple other blogs that he edited, I’ve got a sense of what he’s looking for, I guess. But yes, Dale is a great editor.

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  11. My mother and her sister divided the house chores so that my aunt cooked and my mom cleaned. Mom has always liked cleaning better, although she is a good cook when she puts her mind to it. I also started cooking in self-defense, as my mom always helped my dad at his gas station/coffee shop/carwash. My dad is a good cook too, his specialty being oyster stew. I made really beautiful cream puffs when I was in Grade 5, filled with home made vanilla cream pie filling and topped with chocolate sauce. The sauce was a little thin, as I recall, but it tasted good. My flops usually involve heating sugar syrup when making candy and caramel. I always burn it the first time. I also have problems overcooking jams so that they are too stiff.

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  12. Right, Ben, salt for sugar is a poor substitution! Just one more folks, and I’ll shut up.

    One summer day my former wife decided to grill a whole turkey, something we’d never done. She set it up and we prepared to let it go for hours. About halfway through the process, our “Happy Hour” of scotch and wine had gotten out of control, and I think neither of us remembered we were cooking a turkey. But although we were impaired, we couldn’t fail to hear the ominous roaring sound in the back yard like a airliner on the tarmac testing its engines. Somehow the propane grill had burned through the tank hose. Now that hose was waving around like a wounded snake with a hissing gas flame about six inches long at the end. As it whipped about, the hose had set fire to the wood shelves on both sides of the grill. We called 911.

    The local fire department decided to use this call as a training run, and soon we heard sirens. Six incredibly tall firemen (all of them laughing) in yellow slickers, face masks, boots, fire extinguishers and the other gear came running. One fireman seemed to have a hero complex. He yelled something about how the propane tank on fire like that was “a bomb that could take out the whole house.” They began spraying retardant foam on the tank. And just when things couldn’t have gotten weirder, one fireman reached out with a tool like a medieval ax on a long pole to cautiously raise the lid of the grill. “Yer turkey’s coming along just fine, Ma’am!” he called.

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    2. I was already laughing by the time I got to this, so I had nowhere left to go but falling off my chair laughing. Bet those firefighters are stil talking about that one.

      I will also add that putting sugar in the partially full salt shaker does no one any favors, and can take a while to detect.

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      3. Famous story in my wife’s family: an aunt had a fire in her kitchen in MPLS. When the firemen came, she asked them to go around to the back door so they did not track on her carpet. The firemen demured.

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  13. my mom always knew jsut what to cook. it said so right on the back of the campbells soup can. we laughed at the family get togethers and knew they would not be complete without the burned rolls. the square ones that come 12 to a box that you take the celephane off and throw in the oven for 5 minutes. without exception they were always burnt. she went to school as i was growing up and got her art ed degree and taught high school art at my high school. as the population of bloomington started going down she decided she had better go back and get a second degree in home ec so she could be assured of keeping a job. it was prety funny to have a home ec teacher teaching the girls how to cook off the back of campbells soup cans and burning the rolls.
    the worst meal i cn remember cooking was on a camping trip with a guy wh was really sad to be away form home on thanksgiving and with a damn vegetarian. we were on a tight budget and i decided to make hamburger helper with fake hamburger that i was not familiar with. it ended up tasting kind of like wet cardboard and that added to the hamburger helper didn’t do too much si we tried spicing it up with salt and got a little carried away. salty wet cardboard hamburger helper for thanksgiving was just the begining of my challenges with that travel companion. guys who can’t roll with the punches are my idea of a tough row to hoe. i do remember the rock climbing after the bad food was exceptional.

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  14. Off Topic in response to the rest of yesterday’s blog, WOW. Lots of wisdom in there.

    Clyde – yes, people shy away from asking about my son; I believe they think they will remind me of him and make me sad. But it is actually a joy to talk about him, one way of keeping him “here.” In an Alice Walker novel (By the Light of My Father’s Smile, I think), she says there is not one death but three:
    when the heart stops beating,
    when they are laid to rest, and finally,
    the last time their name is spoken.

    Renee, my grandmother also lived in NYC around that time — would give anything to know exactly where, for next visit.
    …and Jacque, one day you mentined doing a tour around central Iowa — I’d come with…

    Krista – is that original cabin you described still standing, or was it torn down?

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  15. Good morning and good cooking,

    Joanne, thanks for the good presentation of one of my favorite things, cooking.

    My mother taught high school home economics before she got married and was a good cook for her time. We had fairly standard meals of the day, mainly meat and potatoes with a vegetable which might be a canned vegetable from the store. We did have a fairly large garden and had some fresh stuff from the garden and some home canned goods and even some garden products from our very small freezer. I think my mother acquired some of her cooking skill from her mother, especially her skill at baking very good pies and many kinds of cookies.

    I did almost no cooking when I was at home. I did learn to do some simple cooking to feed myself as an undergraduate living in a rooming house with a kitchen. My mother sent me some recipes that worked well for me including one for making chili that I liked. Near the end of my college days I got married and my wife and I starting experimenting with more interesting kinds of food which many people were trying at that time. There were plenty of these “experiments” that turned out badly. Over time we have become good cooks and don’t have very many failures when we try something new.

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  16. My sister gave me a breadmaker when that was the hot new kitchen appliance. Once I used the timer function, expecting to have a nice warm loaf of french bread when I got home. Instead I had something resembling brown poured concrete in the bread pan. I had a terrible time prying it out. After I threw it away, and after the garbage pickup, I realized I had discarded the kneading blade with the loaf. Had to call the breadmaker company and order a replacement.

    I’m good at pie crust, though.

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    2. Oh yes, I usually have pretty good results. I found I prefer making the dough in the breadmaker and then transferring it to a loaf pan for baking. It has a better shape that way, and you don’t have to struggle to separate it from the kneading apparatus after baking.

      The only breads I have problems with are recipes with rye flour. I have trouble getting enough rise out of them.

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      1. Thanks, Clyde! There is a discrepancy in the spelling on my grandparents’ Ellis Island immigration record. It’s spelled Volmwinkel there. I pulled out the photo from my father’s grade school picture, and in it he’s holding a small chalkboard that appears to say “Vohwinkel 490-7”. I always thought it said Volmwinkel, since I assumed the Ellis Island record was correct, but they must have misheard or mistranscribed it.

        I will have to do some more reading on the area, now that I know where it was.

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  17. Fascinating topic! I’ll have to read all these when I get home.

    My worst food disaster was a joint effort with my roommate at the time. We were making chili for our male friends who lived a few doors down from us. We had made chili before, using my grandmother’s recipe, and it was delicious. We decided to try making her mother’s recipe this time. She didn’t have a written recipe, but was trying to go from memory…. In the end, she just kept adding more salt, saying it was needed. I don’t know why I didn’t stop her, but I could not eat that chili. It was so salty it was disgusting. The guys ate every drop though, so we didn’t have leftovers 🙂

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  18. This relates more to yesterday’s blog-Yesterday my parents went to a funeral of a good friend, Johnnie, an elderly man of Norwegian heritage. His wife is still alive. She is Norwegian, too. I will never forget that for our wedding she gave me and my husband 1 pillowcase, hand decorated with rosemalled designs and the words “this is the day the lord has made, rejoice in it”. Why only one pillow case? I will never know.. In any event, their son is a choir director at Augusta College in Sioux Falls, and the whole Augustana choir showed up to sing at the funeral. What a great way for an old Norwegian Lutheran to leave this world!

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    1. Indeed – I think that a good Norwegian Lutheran sent on his/her way to the great beyond *without* singing might wonder what they had done wrong. 😉

      (The choir – at the church where my father had been a member for 50+ years and in the choir for most of those – sang the Hallelujah chorus as a surprise at the end of my dad’s memorial service. Fabulous.)

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  19. Today is a training day, in between training sessions with people in St. Cloud vis GoToMeeting. May not be back on
    HAPPY THANKSGIVING DAY

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  20. Until I got my high-tech Amana Radar Range in 1970 (did I mention I’m no spring chicken) I could never make cooked pudding without burning it, and the smell of burned puddding is awful. The miracle of microwaves allowed me a lot more cooking successes. I thought I was at least an adequate cook but my daughters and their husbands disagree so I guess it’s amazing they grew up nourished. Maybe one of you is one of them in disguise.

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    1. I have repressed the memory of cooked pudding on the stove. I was often assigned the task of “stir constantly” and was always accused of not “stirring to the bottom”. I lived in fear of scorched pudding or burnt cookies which clearly indicated I was “Not Paying Attention to What I Was Doing” (probably trying to read at the same time, wonder where the s&h picked up that habit). I vaguely remember hiding a pan of burnt cookies someplace and eventually eating the evidence.

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    3. Oops, it was actually 1976 when the bicentennial daughter was a baby, not the big sister. Don’t want to sound like I had a Radar Range too much ahead of the curve.

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    4. This reminds me, my Mom would make a butterscotch pudding and pour it into these little, I don’t know, maybe ‘Sherbert cups’? Little glass cups with a foot on them… wonderful stuff…
      I should get that recipe, shouldn’t I? Hmmm…. good stuff….

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  21. My favorite goof up was my sister’s. She mixed up the measurements on the butter package and put twice as much in the fudge as was called for. The fudge was OK after you scraped off the layer of butter.

    OT we went to hear Garrison and Vocal Essence-IT was wonderful. MPR will broadcast parts of it tomorrow morning. IT would go well with potato peeling!

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  22. What fun! Great topic on the day before the feast.

    Most of the women are pretty good cooks just as a matter of course. The notable exception was my paternal grandmother, the farm wife with 6 children, go figure. The daughters are all very fine cooks, probably for the same reason as your sister, Joanne.

    As kids, we all enjoyed cooking and going through my mother’s cookbooks and magazines to find and try out the exotic stuff. Since we were confined to the contents of small town Iowa grocery stores (Ames was “the City” to us), we could only do so much damage, and most of what we made was edible, but often too fussy to make on a repeat basis.

    The Danish farmwives I grew up amongst were also “to die for” cooks.

    So when something went sadly wrong, it became part of family lore.

    We decided one year to make our own divinity (Renee, your post tells me you may see where this is going). We got plenty of it (along with lovely steaks) from the members of Dad’s congregation, but DIY runs strong, and (ominous chord) how hard could it be? We mixed up the ingredients, cooked until the candy thermometer said it was done and proceeded to pour out, um, not divinity. More like permanently melted marshmellow goo. Maybe it would “set up” when it cooled. Or not. Maybe the kitchen was just too warm, so we packed it into an ice cream container, neatly separated with sheets of waxed paper and put it out in the garage to “cool off”. Days later, still goo. We would go out and peel off a glob of the sticky sweet mess (so as not to waste it). None of us can eat divinity to this day without mentioning that mess.

    There was also the time there was a big dinner at church that had twice baked potatoes as part of the menu. Every bit of oven space in the church and parsonage was pressed into service. My mother had an old stove she kept in the basement for canning season (so as not to “heat up the whole house”). A week or two later, we noticed a nasty smell. My mother hates mice with a burning passion and was sure one of the nasty beasties had died down there someplace. Nope, an entire pan of twice baked potatoes in a cold oven, gone to solid mold. Mention twice-baked potatoes in my family, and you are likely to get a snicker.

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    1. I recently saw a digital candy thermometer that is said to give accurate readings with only a couple of millimeters or so of it in the syrup. I am going to ask for one for Christmas.

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      1. So you are a candy maker. When I was a pastor there were 5 old women in the church who had learned to make Whitman Sampler like sets of candy. They would ge together and make boxes for people, always a big on e for me and my wife. Wow!!

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      3. I want to be a candy maker, but the thermometer has always been a problem since I never have had one that is accurate enough, and I invariabley fail. I think this new product is my only hope. I have always envied those rare creatures who could assess the stage of a sugar syrup by just looking at it.

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      4. We’ve always had good luck when making fudge by using the cup of cold water technique, but resort to the thermometer whe we don’t know what we are doing. May be putting the digital on my Christmas list too, thanks Renee!

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      5. all that work for divinity – yikes. i never liked it, but my Mom LOVED it and always made it for the holidays. about four years ago, when Mom was no longer able to stand to beat the egg whites and syrup, “we” made a batch. well, “we” made two batches because the first one didn’t set up. i still find little specks of rock-hard divinity on my cupboards (so, if it wouldn’t set up on the sheet of wax paper, why the ^&%$# would it set up like a rock on my cabinets???) when the first one didn’t set up, Mom sat in her walker crying, and saying she just wanted to make it “one, last time.” so we made another. that one worked. whew!

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      6. yup, sounds like the same result we got. glad you got it to work out for your mom’s sake. none of us has ever tried again.

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      1. I will not ride on anything slippery. So I put it up on the trainer stand and will ride indoors after taking this week off because what I did to my hip. I did 4575 miles outdoors, a rather low number but so be it. Did make my odometer go over 35,000, but just barely. So I did 35,000 miles outdoors in 9 seasons, except one of those years I only did 700 miles because of back surgery and I moved my home and my business after the surgery.

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  24. When my brother got married, his new wife called my Mom to ask her recipe for stuffing. Mom recited it out starting with, “Two cups rice…” Later, after she hung up, she mused, “Do you think I should have said, ‘two cups ~cooked~ rice?’ Nah, she’s got to know to cook the rice first before stuffing it in the turkey.” Three days later, my brother called to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. Mom said, “So how was the stuffing.” My brother paused and replied, “…a little crunchy…”

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  25. Oh my gosh, you guys are hysterical! Such excellent stories — thanks for sharing! I feel like a great cook compared to some of these stories (blowing up pressure cookers and gas grills — yikes). Didn’t realize cooking was so hazardous. Although my oldest sister had a major smoke fire in house from supper left on stove waaayyy too long — melted the pot.

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  26. While I was out and about w/ my mom this morning I was trying to explain the blog and told her JoAnne’s story and mine. She then told me that when she was a young married, she was invited to a gathering of neighborhood women. She knew how to make a pie crust, so she went to the store and bought two cans of cherries, dumped them into her crust and baked away. When she took the pie to the party, the hostess said “Oh, where did you get pitted cherries at this time of year?” My mom said “pitted?” She then admitted to all the other ladies that they cherries had pits. They were all very nice and said not to worry, they would just eat around the pits. My mom says that she was mortified as all the ladies pushed the cherry filling around with their forks trying to avoid the pits!

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  27. OK, just one more! I promise! MIG talked about shopping for groceries in Ames, my home town. If she did, she surely shopped at the Fareway, the biggest supermarket in the area. My mother was there once to witness an odd customer. An old lady came whose face commanded interest. She had widely set eyes, a flat nose and short-cropped grizzled hair. “She looked like a pug or Winston Churchill,” said Mom.

    My mother couldn’t take her eyes off the old lady, partly because she muttered non-stop in a confrontational way, arguing her way through the tomatoes, cukes and onions. Just as she was leaving the produce section this woman picked up a ball about the size of a cantaloupe, a ball of suet studded with sunflower seeds. It had a string.

    “What’s THIS?” she demanded of a young Fareway clerk, tossing this thing and looking at it suspiciously.

    “Oh, madam, that is a bird ball.”

    “BIRD BALL???” Regarding the thing with horror, the old woman chucked it nearly up to the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Without paying attention to where it came down, she seized her cart and rushed off toward the fruit. “MUST OF COME OFF AN OSTRICH!!!!“

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  28. when i was a kid my mom of campbell’s soup and burned roll fame started a grease fire and threw a cup of water on the flames to put them out. well that spread the fire, filled the house with smoke had the fire department there in minutes to tell her about how to put out the fire by pouring flour on it or putting a cover on the pan to smother the flame rather than water. the curtains got cleaned. a painting crew from the insurance company came in and painted the kitchen pepto bismal pink and we were good to go. one week later the grease fire started again and it took her a while to put it out because she kept the flour in the cupboard above the stove so she ended up trying to find a cover that would fit the pan. got it out but had to call the fire department again because she had a fire in the airsucker vent above the stove. she had to clean the drapes again and the kitchen got painted yellow this time. she was kind of happy because she hadn’t like the pink very well.

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  29. Good topic on a day when many of us are involved with food preparation, or thinking about getting started soon.

    I made the filling for the mock mince pie, and measured dry ingredients for rolls and pie crusts and the filling for the pumpkin pie. I start baking in earnest tomorrow morning.

    Fingers crossed for no major catastrophes tomorrow in Baboonland.

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    1. i got the turkey into the brine, the sweet potatoes done the onions caramelized, wild rice completed through step 2 (finish up tomorrow). up to the radio and good smells tomorrow. enjoy all.

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    2. My job this year is easy: appetizers and a bottle of wine. Cheese purchased at the “farmer’s market” that was on campus at work on Tuesday (got a really yummy 5-year-old cheddar and some apricot brie – and bought gjetost from my local grocery), veggies purchased pre-cut, wine comes out of the closet where I keep spare bottles. I worked a little by making a baked artichoke appetizer that has a little Tabasco in it – but it goes together quickly, and you can make it the night before ‘cuz you serve it cut into bite-sized squares and they can be cold (these are out of the oven and in the fridge awaiting their trip, with the cheese, etc., to Brainerd tomorrow).

      Happy thanksgiving all – hope your days tomorrow are safe, relaxing, and stress and drama-free.

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  30. Evening!
    I have a story that’s only related as it’s an ‘Iron Stomach’ type story but not ‘food preparation’ related…

    Cleaning out my Mother-in-Law’s house a couple years ago after her husband died… one of the jobs I took was emptying the freezer.
    As with most people of that generation, they saved EVERYTHING so this chest freezer was full. And hadn’t been emptied in years. There must have been a power failure at some point because the bottom foot was solid ice — with the food frozen into it….
    So when I got to that point we just propped the lid open, put a fan on it for the night and came back in the morning.
    Down in the bottom of this pit of despair were whole chickens, bags of cranberries (dated “August 1989”) and other un-identifiable food stuffs… the cranberries have leaked and I’m fishing around in this blood red pool hauling out semi-thawed items. Our 15 yr old son comes and looks over my shoulder– and the look on his face was just incredible. Imagine the look of disgust, horror and fear! I said he could help and he just raised his hands in surrender and slowly backed away.
    Taught him a lot about being a ‘horder’… Plus I gained a lot of respect from him that day for being willing to do that job. I told him it was only because I KNEW it was leaking cranberries that I could fish around in there and not freak out…

    Thanks for all the stories today people… really really fun reading.

    Enjoy the coming days!

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      1. Sounds great! We are making three pies and bean dip. Our friends are bringing the turkey and dressing. We are having bacon smashed potatoes, healthy green bean casserole, French bread, and cranberry salsa,. I am relieved that son and daughter-in-law are staying in Fargo tonight instead of driving to Rush City. Son asked how to bone a turkey breast and is then brining it.

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  31. Thanks for a great day of laughs, my fellow Baboons! Here’s hoping all your cooking and baking endeavors are made with love and gratefulness, and turn out beautifully.

    Yup — my two cheesecakes are done and seemed to turn out well. Not perfect, but certainly adequate — no one will complain. I guess that’s my price of admission to the family feast. Happy Thanksgiving to all and safe travels!

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