Mom's Home Cooking

Today is my mother's 84th birthday. She lives by herself in Lincoln, Nebraska, is very active both in terms of activities and exercise, still travels, and has a younger boyfriend (he's only in his late 70s), all of which I hope bodes well for my siblings and me. Nevertheless, since I called her this morning I've been musing about life with Mom and how its sometimes hard to remember how old she is when I talk to her on the phone. I grew up in a typical (I think) Midwestern family - Mom, Dad, 3 kids and a dog - at a time when we all played in the neighborhood without the fear of being abducted (it happened but it was rare). We were also pretty typical of the time in the way we ate. In many ways, my upbringing informed much of the way I still think about food today. It's not that we were a bunch of foodies, cooking at my mother's knee and learning all the Old World secrets like I read in so many food bios and cookbooks. Rather, it was a more basic experience, that of sitting down as a family for dinner every night. In our house, dinnertime was almost a sacred event, not to be missed unless you had a really good excuse.

The food we ate in our house was good but certainly not what most people would think of as "gourmet" but solid, good tasting food nonetheless. Often, because for many years both of my of my parents worked (for awhile Mom worked the evening shift and Dad worked days), we would have stews and such out of a crock pot or my Dad would make dinner. We had pot roast on Sundays, had big dinners at holidays, often with friends and family over, and we relished the bounty of summer produce from our garden and the gardens of friends whose tomatoes and squash would be so prolific that we often found bags of vegetables on our steps in July and August. Dad would make candy at Christmas time - fudge, divinity and almond bark were his specialties, and Mom baked pies and cakes. In fact, we almost never had store-bought snacks in the house - chips, soda, cookies, etc. If we wanted sweet snacks, and Mom hadn't baked anything, we would have to make it ourselves. For this reason I could make a decent pie crust and excellent cakes when I was quite young, gleaned from our "Betty Crocker for Kids" cookbook.

Later in my life, after becoming a step-father and subsequently a grandfather, my wife and I have maintained the tradition of family dinners, although empty-nesters now dinnertime is likely just the two of us and often our grandson. I rarely make pot roast and I don't bake much these days except at Thanksgiving, the dinner table tradition is the thing that is the most important to me and perhaps the lack of it in so many modern households is why there are so many problems in the world. Over dinner with my family as a boy we all talked about our day, told stories, listened to Dad tell amusing things that happened at work and generally communed with one another. That kind of bonding and dinner conversation, I believe, is not conducive to going out and becoming a criminal. Dad is gone now but whenever I see my mother, which is several times a year, we always sit down for dinners and we talk. Thanks Mom and happy birthday.