Kids Cooking
Scott Mclean
A show on TV today put me in mind of kids cooking.
I’m afraid none of the culinary genius those kids showed was present in us at a young age. Steve would take pork and beans, cottage cheese, or both and put them between two bread slices with copious amounts of potato chips. He thought this was a great sandwich. His kitchen tip was that regular chips were better than dip chips. Also, corn chips were a non starter.
While camping, we would sometimes improvise on sandwiches using leftovers or whatever was available. I can attest that fried potatoes, red beans, and a burnt marshmallow were not a good combination.
Steve asked me to bake some cookies when I was about 12. He picked out a chocolate cookie in one of Mom’s Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks. We didn’t have any chocolate or several ingredients so I substituted. One of the substitutions was almond extract and I added green food coloring because they looked boring. They were edible but just barely. The surviving cookies looked like sickly frogs.
As for surviving, did you know that it’s not a good idea to substitute popcorn kernels for nuts and bake them at 400 degrees? It looked like half the cookies wandered into a minefield. I had a mess to clean up and we ate or threw away the evidence. Steve said the green coated popcorn was tasty. I later would cook dishes that my parents and aunt were fond of.
Steve and his friend had helped the friend’s mom make spaghetti and he decided to make some as a surprise for our folks. He asked me to watch the spaghetti while he gathered ingredients for the sauce. No tomato paste so he used ketchup. Mom had a small spice rack someone had given her and Steve used what looked like a third to a half of a bottle of 4 or 5 spices he found interesting. His piece de resistance was the item he went to gather. His friends mom told him she always used sage. At the time we called sagebrush and greasewood both sage. You guessed it, Steve dumped a large handful of greasewood leaves in the sauce.
Luckily for me, I don’t care for tomato sauce so I was excused. From the way it smelled, I don’t know how Mom and Dad got the couple of bites they managed down. The creator of this mess saved them. I guess he had not tried it and when he took a bite he spit it out and exclaimed “That tastes like shit!” He didn’t get in trouble for cussing at the table I think largely because they were relieved at not having to eat any more. Mom whipped up some BLT’s and all was good.
We both eventually became good cooks even though some of our early attempts could be classified as toxic waste
Bye.