My Life, My Blog

Cooking Woes

Dang, I need to update this blog more often…

That being said, I have reached a conclusion about my ex hubby, Brad.

His mom must have been a terrible cook.

He FINALLY got a job, not a very lucrative one, but a job none the less; and it often throws him on the night shift. This means that my children and I often eat alone, and I can make things to their specifications instead of his.

For instance… he likes his spaghetti “Al Dente” which to him means, scare it with hot water a little bit. If it is still kind a crunchy, GOOD! He also likes it dry, with very little sauce, so what we usually do is have the spaghetti and sauce separate, and pour sauce on our plated portion of noodles. My son, who I swear is related to Jethro Clampett, likes to drench his noodles in sauce. My daughter and I do that as well. Brad delightedly pours what’s left of the sauce (which isn’t much after the kids and I get through with it) into the remaining spaghetti noodles. The result is a pinkish tinged pasta with some totally untouched-by-sauce portions.

He munches on that for a couple of days, because when I make spaghetti, I make a lot of it!

Last night, I made a huge pot of pasta and made a double dose of meat sauce. I poured the entire pan of sauce into the noodles (which I boiled for 15 minutes instead of the customary 10) It turned into a saucy red paradise. My son was like, “Wow mom, this spaghetti is really good, it tastes like it has more moisture in it!

This morning, I was making bacon in the microwave, via what I call “The Baconator” I don’t know what it is really called, but my elderly Aunt in Kentucky uses one, and I got one as soon as I returned to Michigan last summer. What is a “Baconator?” A Baconator is a round microwave-safe plate with raised ridges and a reservoir to hold the drippy grease. You put your raw bacon, four strips at a time, onto the Baconator, cover the bacon with a paper towel and microwave it for four or five minutes, depending on the thickness of the bacon. When it is done, you have a relatively crisp slice of bacon, and all the bacon grease is drained away!

Brad, of course, likes his bacon burnt, so “done” that it appears shriveled and the color of a dried plum.
My kids, of course, like their bacon normal crispy.

He likes his mashed potatoes dry, with lumps in them, he prefers eggs that are broken and mangled, he likes sandwiches with mustard only, (gag) he likes pork chops overbaked and crunchy… He can cook a chicken tender until it resembles zombie fingers. I even detest his mom’s stuffed cabbages, which are usually tasteless lumps of meat mixture wrapped in overcooked , sometimes burnt cabbage leaves, swimming in a watery sea of tomato soup.

He doesn’t object to my stuffed cabbages though, which are big and fat and saucy, the total opposite of his mom’s.

It makes me wonder. Was his mom just a bad cook? Is this why he likes “reject” food? Poor thing probably grew up eating those kinds of things on a daily basis and this is his version of good. I have to hand it to Mom though, she raised six children to adulthood and beyond with this kind of cooking, and at family gatherings, there are a lot of “Mmms” to be heard.

Perhaps her pork chops burnt because she had to chase down one of her many children, maybe her potatoes were lumpy because she didn’t have time to peel and boil potatoes, and had to use potato buds instead. Perhaps her daughters helped make them and really didn’t know how, and she was too nice to say anything. Maybe her pasta never got cooked enough because she had her seven family members clamoring for food and had to get it on the table faster… There are a lot of variables to how someone cooks. I can’t make any excuses for the stuffed cabbages, however.