Food, Family, and Memory

me-b.v.-playground-in-courreges-boots My parents were always worried that I hadn’t eaten.  “Have you had lunch, Fredde?”  My answer was “YES, of course, I made myself a mayonnaise sandwich!!!” And James Beard is famous for his as well, okay, maybe his is called an onion sandwich, but it’s pretty much the sandwich I made as a kid. essentialjamesbeardbuy now button
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chocolate cake milkMy dad wasn’t much of a cook! He even burned the bacon. His idea of making baked beans was to put them in a pan of boiling water – in the can with the top still on. This might actually work, although the only time I remember him doing it, he forgot about them, the water boiled down, the can exploded (EXPLODED!!!), luckily no one was in the kitchen at the time, and a lot of the baked beans flew up to the ceiling and rested there. I do not remember if my mother thought this was funny.

He was a great barbeq-uer but that’s a different story.

He, also, had a ridiculously high metabolism and ate more than anyone in the family practically until his dying day, (seemingly without much of a weight problem, or cholesterol problem, I might add.) When we were little, he used to get up in the middle of the night sometimes, wake one of us, and we’d tiptoe down to the kitchen for a slice of home-made pie or chocolate cake OR Dad’s one and only specialty not cooked on a grill -- although curiously with grill in its title -- grilled cheese sandwiches.

My dad had a theory that one of the reasons people wake up in the middle of the night is because they’re hungry, so if you ate a piece of pie or cake or a grilled cheese sandwich (preferably with a glass of milk), you would fall right back to sleep. Note: I have not tested this theory since childhood.

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