Our next celebrated day, I believe, would be Mother’s Day, coming up in about three weeks. With that in mind, I’m wondering how many of you have interesting memories to share about your mom and her cooking. Whether your actual mother, or the grandmother, aunt, or friend who stands in your memory at the stove concocting the dishes of your dreams, someone filled you up in more ways than one. Tell about it!! Don’t say you can’t write – there is no wrong or right way to relate your favorite memories. Just start thinking about it, let your thoughts roll down your arm and into your pen (or keyboard). A line or a page, whatever it is, those cooks are worth the honor of your remembering. I hope I get to see some of the resulting stories.
In our part of the country, food served up more than nutrition. From earliest childhood, it delivered delicious comfort, security, and just plain fun. It gave us ties to our heritage and opportunity to experience other cultures. Today, it still does much of the same, although I think the world is so full of distractions and convenience food, that cooking has lost a link to life that it once enjoyed. As many great meals as my mother served up, one of the strongest memory provokers is a method rather than a particular dish. When the weather is cool and rainy, and there are ample indoor chores to be done, I have flashbacks of pressure cookers sputtering away in the kitchen, with steamed up windows, and loads of laundry coming through to be folded. Mama always had a pressure cooker and used it often, I’m sure because of her busy life and the need to have 3 squares on the table every day. I had one for a while, and after the rubber seal lost its stretch, it was overshadowed by the microwave. Fast, but certainly no substitute! Who can parboil a rabbit in a microwave?! I do however, have a pressure canner, and when I hear that pressure control jiggling and shimmying out the steam I think of hot meals that made my parents happy. Whether rabbits my dad brought home from a hunt at Granddaddy’s, or the pigs-in-a-blanket (aka stuffed cabbage rolls) that she learned to make while in Cleveland, Ohio, it always smelled like love. I’d just about welcome some homework to do at the kitchen table if I could just have one of my mama’s meals, cooked under pressure, of one sort or another! With 60’s music playing from the radio, I’m not sure how much homework I actually did, but what a great memory, being warmed, fed, and taught in my Mama’s kitchen!
Thank you God for our food, for the women and men who provided and taught us how to prepare it, and for your Word, our bread of life. Jesus said “I am the bread of life.” (John 6:58)
“Who can find a virtuous wife?…She also rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household…Her children rise up and call her blessed;” Proverbs 31: 10,15,28 (a)
An early “Happy Mother’s Day” to you all! Whether you are a mom or not, you have or have had a mother, and I am wishing you a day of happy memories in that!
Trisha's Coffee Break 
My Mother was a great cook! We were a large family of 7 so during the week cheaper meals such as Pinto beans, cornbread, and meatloaf were meals for weekday standbys. However, on Sunday’s, there was chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and gravey! There was always a green salad and another vegetable, usually greenbeans. Her chicken fried steak did not require a knife and the breading around it was too good! There would be bits of the breading in the gravey which were left in the pan after cooking the steak. I have tried so many times to replicate but to no avail. My mouth is watering now! Oh yes, there was lemon pie as dessert. I have just described my birthday meal! The first year after she passed away, I cried like a baby because there was no birthday meal for me!
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So sweet Paula! You made me smell steak frying! And my husband and kids thought that meatloaf meal was better than just a weekday standby! I didn’t realize there were 7 in your family. Paul, Johnnie Bell, you, Mark, and who?
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This Mother’s Day will be a first for us. A few short weeks ago she went Home to be with Jesus, my dad, and other family members gone on before. In the last few years her little frail body was unable to perform any cooking tasks. However, last Thanksgiving, we sat her in the kitchen, and she mixed up her one and only cornbread dressing. She talked us through each step, until the actual ingredient mixing. We set the pan in her lap and she told us what to add, how much to pour at a time, while she mixed it up. What a sweet memory we created that day, as well as many other memories to sustain us until.we are reunited! Thank you, Trisha, for your uplifting words and memories!
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Teresa, that is a precious memory!! I wish I’d done the same thing – now none of us can make Mama’s dressing!
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