Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (29 page)

Flipping the question
around, I asked Mrs. Olson if there was anything
she
wouldn’t eat. As an example,
I mentioned my feelings about beef liver, and I think I touched a nerve.

“Yeah,
I don’t eat that anymore. We had to eat it once a week when I was growing up
and . . . I will never eat that again.”

As experienced in the
kitchen as she might be, Mrs. Olson knows her limitations. She offered a
lovely, pastoral story of Carl’s brother, a fox, and a crockpot—

“One
day he
did
shoot a fox and he skinned it and he says, ‘Mom, you gotta
cook
this—it
was like skinning our dog!” He said ‘I just hate to waste it.’

And
so I called several of the older women whose husbands hunted and said, ‘How do
you cook a fox?’ and one of them says, ‘Mary, I’ve never heard of anybody
cooking a fox. I don’t know if it can be done.’

So,
I put it in the crockpot, with lots of celery, and onions, and tomatoes, and it
wasn’t too long and the smell of wet fur filled the house. 

I
brought the fox out and I said to Mark, ‘You take the first bite,’ so he did,
and he said ‘Mom, why don’t you just take it outside. Just . . . take it
outside.’”

“Years
later, I read
A Year in Provence
,
and
there’s story of an old guy who would
tell
people how to cook fox—and it
was a joke! You
cannot
cook fox.”

We moved on to happier
memories when I asked her about a dinner for Carl’s groomsmen. There were about
forty people, and she prepared a whole
twenty-five pound
salmon.

Of course, with the
salmon, she also prepared baked potatoes with rosemary, lemon, and balsamic
vinegar, and a whole head of cauliflower that was on a bed of baby peas with a
smoked Gouda sauce, and two kinds of salad, and four kinds of pie. You know,
like anyone would. Back to the salmon:

“I
did
not
think
ahead. I didn’t have a pan for anything that big, so I had to construct a pan. I
put two jelly roll pans together with layers of aluminum foil.

It
filled up the whole oven, so of course then the air couldn’t circulate, and the
salmon took
forever
. . . GAAAH!
So
embarrassing. But it tasted fine.”

Like all great chefs,
Mrs. Olson has needed to think on her feet. She shared with me an example of
how she’s turned cooking mistakes into innovations—

“My
favorite thing to make is a scratch thirteen egg-white angel food cake. Once, I
took it out of the oven too soon, and you tip it over a bottle, and the whole
thing just fell, all over the countertops.

But
I decided, well, there ya go! So, I scooped it in dishes with fresh
raspberries, and it was something no one had ever had before.”

Even the most seasoned
chefs have their stories of dining debacles. For instance, here’s a story with
all the elements of classic horror: a birthday party, baking, and fifth-graders
left to their own devices:

“My
daughter was having a birthday party in fifth grade. So I thought, what I’d do
with all these girls, is I’d put them in teams of two.

And
I put all the ingredients for a cake on the table, and they would have to put
the cake together without a recipe.

Well,
one of the girls got the garlic powder out. The whole house smelled very
strange, and because there was no proper measuring of the leavening agent, the
oven—there were flames in the oven, smoke in the house . . .
that
was a
wonderful disaster.”

Her other personal
‘kitchen nightmare’ happened when she was a newlywed—

“Soon
after we were married, we invited some of the relatives over, and I had never,
as a single gal, put together a meal with various courses, and
nothing
was ready together. Some things
were overcooked and some things weren’t started, and it was
so
embarrassing.”

Forty years, and those
are your worst cooking disasters?
None
of those stories involve
injuries, or things blowing up!

Later, she gave me some
insight into one of the biggest reasons she makes things from scratch,
despite
the risk of mishap.

“To
keep it interesting. I used to make my own graham crackers, for example, and
all kinds of fun things.

You
know, when you’re home all day, and you have four kids in five years . . . you
just give ‘em each a bowl, and go to it! It’s a mess, but it’s two hours
killed.”

Even when talking about
making a romantic meal for her husband, Mrs. Olson demonstrates old-fashioned
heartland thrift and practicality.

Phil’s favorite dessert
is
crème brûlée,
and I
mentioned that I’d like to make it, but I don’t have one of those blowtorch
thingies—

“I
was at a kitchen shop, and they are
thirty-five dollars,
for
the
cheapest one I found! After (the
crème
brûlée
)
is
chilled, I just put it under the broiler with
sugar on it, and they all get done at the same time.

You
have to watch it, but that’s the way they do it in France. (The torches
are) just something more to sell at the kitchen store.”

As they might say in
Willmar, meeting Mrs. Olson was a hoot. What I appreciated the most about her
was that no-nonsense, Midwestern logic. After all, it’s helped her cook at
least fifteen thousand meals. I did the math.

You can’t talk with
somebody’s mom for half an hour and not come away with some wisdom. This is how
Mrs. Olson remembers her childhood—

“My
dad was a letter carrier and my mother never worked outside the home, so money
was tight.

But I
remember meals, when it was time for a paycheck to come, and we’d have oatmeal
for supper with ice cream on top,
and we all thought we were kings
.”

When I asked her for a
family recipe she might like me to include in this book, she pointed out that
“any
recipe is just sorta the beginning.”

While
that’s certainly true, I don’t think I would tinker too much with a recipe from
Mrs. Olson. Especially one that was awarded ‘runner-up’ in an actual, honest-to-goodness
Betty Crocker contest! It doesn’t get much more real than that.

Ingredients

1
lb                  ground turkey
½
c                  sliced green onion
4
oz                 undrained chopped green chilies
1
                     clove  garlic (minced)
½
c                  raisins
3
T                   almonds
1
½ t                chili powder
½
t                   cumin
½
t                   cinnamon
¼
t                   ground cloves
2
(8 oz)            cans  tomato sauce
1
(14.5 oz)       can whole tomatoes
8 
                    pimento stuffed olives (halved)

Brown meat, stirring and adding onions,
chili and garlic. Cook 3 minutes, add raisins and remaining ingredients. Cover
and reduce heat. Simmer at least 15 min.

There are only a handful
of childhood food memories that have stuck with me. Don’t misunderstand; it’s
not that we didn’t eat
well
. But we never ate
fancy.

Even on a fixed income,
Mom always made sure we had some meat, some carbs and something green on our
plates every evening at five (to this day, no matter when dinner is supposed to
be, I still get hungry around four-thirty).

Dinner was always more
satisfying
than it was
memorable
. For some reason, the only entrée I really
remember is her stuffed bell peppers. I didn’t understand cooking, but I
thought it was cool that you could take something I didn’t like at all (green
peppers), and an hour and a half later it would mysteriously taste great.

Another food memory,
and one I can almost taste to this day, is of the first fish I ever caught (not
that this is relevant, but it also is the only fish I’ve ever caught).

I was eight years old,
and we were camping, and I caught one trout. Cooked it over an open fire next
to where I caught it, and to this day, I think it’s the best-tasting fish I’ve
ever had.

I also have fond
ish
memories of a food item from the high school cafeteria. It was one of the
rotating ‘main courses’ on the school lunch menu, and it was called a ‘Pepper
Belly.’

A ‘Pepper Belly’ was a
bag of Fritos corn chips, slit open on the side, covered with chili, cheese and
chopped, raw onions. And it was considered a ‘main course.’ Even in high
school, I thought, “This probably isn’t the healthiest lunch I could have.”

The strangest childhood
food memories I have involve a pot belly stove. Part of the strangeness is that
we
had
a pot belly stove.

For
some reason, in our 1970s era kitchen, next to the avocado-colored fridge, was
a wood-burning stove, like nineteenth-century pioneers would have used. And we
weren’t exactly in the wilderness. I grew up in a tract house about ninety
miles from Los Angeles.

We hardly ever used
it—occasionally we’d fire it up to heat the kitchen (although since space
heaters existed in the seventies, I think my stepdad got it so that he could
add ‘chopping wood’ to my list of chores).

My mom rarely cooked on
it, either, but every Christmas morning, I would wake up to the smell of fried
eggs and sausage cooking in butter on top of our potbelly stove.

That smell
defined
Christmas for me, especially since our family was staunchly in the ‘
gifts
are opened on Christmas morning not Christmas eve’
camp.

As a boy, the aroma of
eggs cooking on a wood-burning stove meant I might be minutes away from
something  that had been on my Christmas list for months.

After a couple of years
of finding
my
way around a kitchen, I cooked my first holiday meal last
Thanksgiving. In retrospect, I should have chosen an easier holiday (there
must
be some quick and simple Arbor Day recipes out there).

But I forged ahead,
planning to make everything from scratch with one important exception—the
cranberry sauce.

I know there are plenty
of recipes for homemade cranberry sauce, but for me, cranberry sauce comes out
of a can, shaken onto a plate in one solid mass, still marked by lines from the
inside of the can.

I don’t care if you
slow-roasted your bird for eighteen hours, lovingly mashed each potato by hand,
and picked the green beans yourself, if there’s not a tube of cranberry ‘sauce’
on the table, I’ll have Thanksgiving dinner somewhere else, thank you very
much.

I bought a five pound,
bone-in turkey breast, patted it dry, and added a spice rub mix I made, and
then I slathered the skin with butter. It’s not like we were celebrating
National Health Food Day.