Mom’s cooking:

Being new at this “blogging” thing, I came here to check on the activity of yesterday’s post. To my astonishment…there wasn’t any, disappointing you may say, correct I would answer, until I realized that the effort I put in to dazzle my (as yet) non-existent audience went for naught because nothing was posted, which I will attempt to rectify (if I can remember what I wrote) Here goes.

..and tofu dogs for all!! Imagine the surprise of a young teenager upon his return home from another brain numbing day at school, to find his beloved mother toiling over a vat of miso-soup while arranging tofu dogs on a plate for whatever one does to them to make one wish to eat one of the grey clay-like objects. Not that there’s anything wrong with tofu, but this was the mid 1970’s and most people (including myself) had never even heard of tofu. Mom was like that: a couple of months earlier she read that aluminum cookware was the root of all evil (or something like that) and threw all of our pans in the trash (before buying new ones). The family ate out for the next couple of days, except for mom, who wanted to check what type of pans they were using in the restaurant’s kitchen before agreeing to eat there. We let her fend for herself.

Moving backward in time I come to mom’s disturbing fascination with stewed tomatoes. She seemingly put them in everything for months, maybe she read something that claimed they were a cure-all for whatever ails one or perhaps there was a “buy one can, get a gross for free” sale at the A & P. Whatever the reason, we had “French Spaghetti” (don’t ask) with stewed tomatoes, “American Chop Suey” (don’t ask) with stewed tomatoes, Mac & cheese with stewed tomatoes, even (get ready for it) calves liver with stewed tomatoes. And it wasn’t as if mom came up with creatives recipes for using stewed tomatoes, it was pretty much from can (plock) to pan, to plate. I used to feed as much of mom’s meals to our beloved dog Holly, who died at age 7 from liver failure. Coincidence ??