Day 177
Today’s conversation with Sam prompted me to thinking about food from the 60’s. My mom always set a nice dinner table and made whatever she was making for the 5 of us look really pretty … and it was good, too.
Except for the iceberg lettuce with half pear on it topped with a mayonnaise and nut concoction … or fruit and cottage cheese. Both of those things made me want to flee from the dinner table.
That and beef kidney stew. It was one of those nasty things that my mom made for my dad once in a while … and it never failed but I could smell it from the corner of Greenleaf and Oleander (some 7 houses away) and standing at that corner if I smelled anything sinister on my way home from school … I KNEW to keep on walking to my friend’s house instead of going home. There was NO way I was going near that house … or that smell … or that stew.
But for the most part we had good victuals. It was a simpler time and we were in the midwest so there were a lot of mashed potatoes (yum – and that to this day I still salivate over) and beef roasts and roasted chickens on Sundays.
Mom made “pigs in a blanket” … which were strips of round steak rolled up with a slice of bacon and then pan cooked and served with marvelous pan drippings gravy over rice or alongside potatoes.
My favorite was chipped beef on toast. How sad is that?!
We ate our fair share of cold cuts … Sundays after church we could always count on open-faced summer sausage sandwiches on rye bread … and potato chips (Jays all the way).
My parents entertained a lot so there were always parties going on at our house … summer nights on the patios … birthday parties … getting their group of friends together … holidays … neighborhood gatherings … it always seemed like we had something going on at our house and that was always tons of fun. Mainly, because I got to “help”.
Help meaning I got to put things “out” … taking trays down to the basement counter or outside to the picnic table. Sometimes I got to make the watermelon boat (a carved out watermelon with part of the top cut off and shaped into a basket or bowl and filled with other cut-up fruits). More often I had the task of making the relish tray … carrot strips, celery stuffed with cream cheese and walnuts, green and black olives, and radishes made into roses (sliced half way through and then put into water overnight in the fridge so they’d open up and look like roses). It was always those same things … not the snap peas and asparagus spears one might find today.
And there was always some sort of casserole or two or three. If it was a potluck, where everyone brought a covered dish, there would be a lot of tempting things to eat … macaroni salads, macaroni and cheese, macaroni and mushroom soup, tuna and macaroni (a lot of macaroni those days). You could count on things being goopy and cheesy, soupy and mayonnaise-y and always yummy. And everything was probably laden with fat and calories and cholesterol artery-clogging goodness galore and no one cared – because it was the 60’s. It was all good.
And, of course, there’d be a few jello molds in the mix … wiggling and jiggling … some with fruit, some plain, some whipped, some frozen; some in molded shapes and others cut into squares. There was NEVER a party without jello.
In any case … we were talking about food from “the old days” and it got me thinking that I’d just whip up a virtual casserole of nostalgia tonight.