Mom’s cooking
This morning I woke up craving meatloaf for some reason. Not that I wanted meatloaf for breakfast, mind you….but maybe that wouldn’t be bad with a sunny side up egg on top and some hash browns on the side. Hmmm…
Oh. Yes, I’m writing a post. I drift back now to remember my mother’s meatloaf, which is indeed a fond memory. It had the right amount of hard crust that I don’t see enough on “modern” meatloaf. I remember it being peppery and more importantly, good days later. Does anyone still make meatloaf sandwiches? I remember those as well. I suppose we don’t…not “nouvelle” enough for us!
So why do I recount this to you, today? It occurred to me in sort of a shock one time that mom’s cooking was rather limited. She only made a few things, and those few things stayed in a rotation forever. There was no “experimenting” with cooking, except maybe cake baking. She was appalled when I went to cook at an Italian restaurant; all that garlic! I would come home from a shift in the restaurant smelling of garlic and she’d give me the evil eye which said I had to take a shower, but even after a shower I still smelled of garlic. The mother of the restaurant owner would give me things to take home for my family; salami, mortadella, soppersata, big chucks of parmesan, and I would be the only one who would eat it! I loved it all, but my family viewed it as alien. It’s strange to say in an American home, but pizza for us was a novelty. Only purchased, never made, pizza would be viewed as “acceptable” at best. It’s funny to think of how much we take what we currently do for granted and project backwards. I want to say my mother was a good cook, but is that so? But maybe she got it right; make half a dozen things really well, not a 100 things half assed.
But back to that meatloaf for breakfast idea….mmmmm……
Ambiance 
A said,
September 23, 2015 at 12:58 am
I remember liking meatloaf sandwiches. White bread. Catsup. Ketchup, spellcheck is insisting. Things change. Now I eat baked tempeh on
whole wheat bread. With catsup/ketchup.
LouiseM said,
September 24, 2015 at 9:05 pm
Meatloaf sandwiches with Miracle Whip, French’s mustard, lettuce and a 1/4 inch slice of my mom’s meatloaf were what showed up in our lunch bag the day after meatloaf was served for dinner. And yes, my mom’s meatloaf had a memorably crusty dark top without catsup or bacon used for the topping. We’d mix it all together for her at the kitchen counter as the groceries were being put away on grocery day (once a week) using our bare hands to squish the egg, torn bread, catsup, onions and hamburger (with a high fat content) together, then pat it into the pans, and score the tops with a fork..
Meatloaf was served with mashed potatoes made by holding the Revere pan of hot cooked spuds directly under the beaters of the Mixmaster, with cooked frozen peas used as the vegetable. Since MrM grew up with bacon topping his mom’s meatloaf, and potatoes that were mashed by hand (lumpier and less “whipped”), that’s mostly the way we went, with the three strips of bacon on top creating a different crust and treat that could be picked off and consumed as the leftovers were being put away.
My uncle used to say mom “pushed the stove”, meaning it all went together fast under high heat. And she did, but she also knew how to pull a dinner together, and to this day I can’t replicate her cooking.
Worse yet, I stopped eating potatoes and went gluten-free a year ago to address internal rumblings and meatloaf hasn’t been the same since, nor have the sandwiches. But thanks for the memories! Feeling better has been the sad but real trade-off, with remembering how things used to be bringing me as close as I can get to being there in present time.
Pizza was not considered to be a food fit for the dinner table in my childhood home, and the only time we could have it was when my dad went out of town to dental conventions and the box of Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee pizza containing a mixable crust, sauce and a packet of cheese would come out of the cupboard for another memorable experience of crust under the category of cardboard. Talk about an experience of “alien” Yup, here’s the box under “vintage” http://pzrservices.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451ccbc69e201a3fcd6686a970b-pi.
Fact: The company was founded by Italian immigrant Ettore “Hector” Boiardi in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. in 1928. What a history! What a country! What an opportunity!.
mockturtle said,
September 24, 2015 at 11:39 pm
My mother never liked to cook. She nonetheless prepared well-thought-out, nutritious meals if not creative ones. We seemed to have fish quit a lot and rice more often than potatoes. And always a nice dessert!
mockturtle said,
September 24, 2015 at 11:40 pm
quite a lot, not ‘quit’ a lot.