Good morning, all! Yestersay was a not-so-good day, and today looks better already. I was happy to get to Chat last night for about 30 minutes, and this week is a social week, and I need to keep up my energy: DRJane is in NYC from Oregon and a good friend from my hometown is here for a conference, so I'll be juggling time with the two ladies. I'm having dinner with my friend Ginny tonight and the East Coast Hainsies have the Big Event wednesday. Last night a friend from college called to say hello before he returned to Ohio this morning; he'd been in New York for Billy Joel's wedding this wekend. It turns out the new Mrs Joel is an alumna of my college, Miami University!
TOD: my mother was passive-aggressive in all forms of motherhood, and that included meals. When she was in good mental state, she was a wonderful cook, and when she wasn't, dinners could be a strange affair. For instance, I didn't know until I got to school and saw other home-made cookies that they didn't come from the oven with charred bottoms. One year, for Thanksgiving, my mother made pecan pies - which were excellent when she was functioning - and she underbaked them, so the custard was very runny. The following Thanksgiving she overbaked them, and you needed a streethammer to cut into them.
But when I think of Mama (a Peggy Wood reference), and good days, these are the things I remember from the kitchen:
1. Doughnuts fried in a heavy iron skillet, sprinkled with powdered sugar.
2, Every Halloween for her favorite neighborhood kids she made popcorn balls which were amazing.
3. Stuffed green peppers
4. Pecan pie: excellent, with only two years of disastrous ones but they were the end of that
5. Apple pie, and my mother's piecrust was really wonderful: she took the scraps of the crust, rolled them out, cut them into wide slices, smeared them with butter, sugar and cinnamin and rolled them into little twists for my brothers and me.
6. I don't ever recall a bad Easter, Christmas, or Thanksgiving dinner, even though some of the holidays were stressed and insane, like the year my brother and his wife, whom my mother hated, were late and she met them at the door by throwing their gifts at them and yelling at them to get lost. On those days, when I think I'm losing it, I remember Mama and realize I've got a long way to go!
