Waiting for Dinner

I’m glad my daughter, Melissa, married her husband, Trevor, for quite a few reasons. First and foremost, he's taken her off my hands and generally puts up with her. Second and secondmost, he’s a great father to Miles and Georgia, who, by the way, look alarmingly like him.

But another important reason I’m happy to have Trevor as a son-in-law is that, of everyone in our immediate family, he is the only one, and I do mean only one, who can cook.

The Big Kat, my ex and the father of my children, has vegetable soup as his signature dish. Said soup is made by pouring canned vegetables in a pot with one chicken bouillon cube and boiling it.

Although my son, Billy, purports to excel in All Things Poultry (i.e. an egg or a boneless breast of chicken) using the melting-butter-and-then-putting-the-poultry-item-in-a-pan-and-covering-it method, the only recipe of his I’ve personally experienced is his Flaming Fart Dip. No need to say any more about that.

Molly, my youngest, is a master at Hamburger Helper and frozen dinners. However, during a recent foray into better eating, she called to ask about fresh vegetables. When I inquired as to if she knew how to peel a carrot, she said in a somewhat sad and tremulous, not to mention a tad accusatory, voice that she didn’t know how to peel anything.

Melissa, who doesn’t cook much at all since she snagged Trevor with her womanly charms, still likes to call my Coca Cola ham recipe her own, although she has to phone me on the Wednesday before every Thanksgiving, asking me what the ingredients are. Since there are only four: ham, brown sugar, honey mustard, and yes, a can of Coca Cola, I’m able to help her no matter where I am or what I’m doing. The only problem with my rendition of Coca Cola ham is that its ultimate level of success depends on how long I sleep the night before, as it is meant to be cooked all night. If I undersleep, it’s underdone. If I oversleep, well, you get it.

So, we are left to Trevor and he with us.

Trevor is a very good cook, a gourmet cook.  He loves good food, fine wines, and craft beers (whatever they are).  He actually flips his dough while making the best pizzas in the world. The bad news for Trevor is that we, his adopted family, are, at best, an inadequate group of appreciators.   Remember, we are the Hamburger Helper, Flaming Fart people.

However, a dearth of understanding of the culinary arts and a lack of palate don't stop us from sitting around and waiting for dinner to come to us.  In the summer, we gather in the back yard, eyeing the grill.  In the winter, we decorate the couch, sniffing the air for food-like aromas. At Christmas, we sit under the tree like a biggie-sized nativity scene, looking like we are expecting our entree to arrive with Baby Jesus.

Waiting for dinner, that's what we do.  That's all we contribute.  And, overall, we are pretty good at waiting.  In fact, it seems we will wait forever.

And that's because Trevor, being the artiste he is, can't be hurried.  Dinner, for him, is a journey, not a destination.  Off to Salmon Dan's house across the street for fish so fresh it's straight from Dan's beer cooler still in the back of Dan's boat sitting in Dan's driveway.  Then down the block to Sharon's coop for eggs so new the hens are still checking under their feathered asses. Finally, he comes through the front door as our mouths begin their serious optimistic waterings, but no, out the back door he goes to the garden for salad greens, reds, and yellows.

Back in the kitchen, he opens a bottle of wine, letting it breathe, and then mixes up an exquisite dressing for the salad.  We, on the other hand, share the couch and a mint from the bottom of my purse.

When dinner finally arrives, it's to die for and we are spent, all of our work done.

Trevor thinks one day he'd like to open a small restaurant, a breakfast or lunch place, farm to table, only the freshest ingredients.

But, in case his patrons get tired of waiting for fresh, good, and real food, or if they run out of bottom-of-the-bag mints, maybe he'll want to offer Billy's dip as an appetizer to keep them entertained while they wait.

Tuna Tuesday

I come from a short line of bad cooks. My mother always said that anyone who could read could cook, but she and I proved her wrong. At Mama’s funeral, my brother brought us all to tears when he said, “There wasn't a can our mother wouldn’t open to make sure we were fed.” Because I am a more modern cook, my preferred mode of culinary conveyance is the microwave. I not only nuke normal items like potatoes and frozen foods, I also microwave meatloaf and barbecued chicken, dishes known for their slow cooking in order to develop flavor. I tend to believe fast cooking just develops it faster.

When I was married, The Big Kat said that whatever fell out of the freezer when I opened it was what we had for supper on any given day. That wasn’t true, but about once a month we would have what I liked to call our Missionary Meal, which was made up of all the tiny bits of leftovers from former tasty meals I’d packed away in the freezer. There would be a spoonful of this and a spoonful of that on each of our plates, all suffering from some degree of freezer burn. I think that was about the time Melissa started eating soup from a can, literally from the can without benefit of bowl or stove-top or even microwave. Billy still swears he starts swelling up when he just gets a gander at my French fries because of the amount of salt I put on them. I am one of those cooks who thinks if a little bit of something is good, a lot of it will be that much better, especially when that something is salt.


Then there was my powdered milk phase. When Melissa and Billy were little, instead of buying milk and just having to throw it out when it went bad, I discovered the wonderfulness of powdered milk. It was especially great for cereal. My technique was this: pour the cereal in a bowl, pour on some still-granulated powdered milk, walk over to the sink to add a little water from the faucet, stir, and, finally, holler "breakfast is ready!" It was perfect for kids who knew no better until their Aunt Dianne invited them for a sleepover and ruined everything with her refrigerated real milk the next morning.

I’ve passed the bad cooking gene down to all three of my kids. Billy has as his signature dish something known as Flaming Fart Dip, and Melissa has been relegated to dish-washing duty in her family. The other day, I was talking on the phone to Molly and there was a strange noise in the background. When I asked her if she was peeling carrots, she said she wasn’t because she didn’t know how to peel anything. The noise was, instead, associated with tearing the plastic wrap off of something before putting it in the microwave, which, I surmise, is a form of peeling, thereby proving Molly wrong as she can, indeed, peel something.

Not too long ago, my friend Allison invited Molly and me over for dinner. She said it wouldn't be any trouble, she's just do up a London Broil. When I told Molly about it she was really excited, but, because she is my child, she wasn't quite sure what a London Broil was. When she got home, she called Billy in Oregon, asking him what he thought it was. His response: "I'm not absolutely sure, but I'm pretty confident it's some kind of fish."

Although not a good cook, I am an organized planner. When the kids were growing up, they could always expect fish sticks on Friday even though we were Methodist and not Catholic. Monday was tacos; Tuesday, spaghetti; Wednesday, Tuna Helper; and Thursday, dogs in a blanket. Since I didn't want to have the DFACS people stopping by and interfering in my life, there were usually some vegetables thrown in each evening, mostly broccoli.

Now that I live alone and because I love alliteration, most every week I have Salmon Sunday, Meatloaf Monday and Tuna Tuesday. After that, it falls apart since I can’t cook anything that begins with W or Th and because Allison and I do our early bird dinner on Fridays. Saturdays are sometimes saved for my current specialty, which I first called Mexican Goulash because of its cilantro and noodles. Then when I realized that I might not have offended enough ethnic or food groups with that name and when I remembered my special secret seasoning (Tony Chachere's) and the fact that I sort of stir fry it, I changed it to Mexican Cajun Asian Goulash. So far, no one has accepted my invitations to stop by for a taste.

As sad as this story has been so far, there is a happy ending. When I'm in Portland, I eat like the queen I was meant to eat like. That's because of Melissa. Whereas some people marry into money, Melissa married into culinary expertise in the form of Trevor Stelson. Melissa's husband, Trevor, is a fantastic cook who creates dishes out of his brain and out of his garden, things I don't even know what they are, but they sure are good. If it weren't for Trevor, we'd all be skinny or dead or most likely both.

However, although Trevor is a great cook, he's not a perfect husband. One afternoon a couple of summers ago, Melissa and I were at her house with Miles, who was still a baby. Trevor, however, wasn't at home. He was out drinking beer. Melissa was talking about how it's usually the women who end up keeping the kids while the men are out carousing. I concurred, saying how women have to do it all, how we are overworked and under-appreciated. At that point, I looked at Melissa and asked, "What are we having for supper?" to which she responded, "I don't know. We'll have to wait until Trevor gets home."

So it looks like we'll have to keep Trevor, despite his need to play and/or watch every sporting event known to humankind and don't forget that beer thing. I just wonder if I could get him to spend his winters in Atlanta. I wonder if he would like my Mexican Cajun Asian Goulash.