I don't like to cook. The failure rate is too high. And the amount of time it takes to cook, and then have it be a sub par product is really discouraging.
Over the years I have blamed my unfriendly cooking outlook on the fact that I was the youngest of a large family, and my work detail for the BIG family dinners was 1) set the tables 2) watch the grand kids 3) dry the dinner dishes, of which I was just one of many trying to keep up with my mother who could wash dishes really, really fast.
At the time I felt lucky I didn't have to be in the kitchen sweating away among a group of women with little space in which to accomplish putting together the delicious meals that were paraded out of there to the formal dining room in my childhood home in Rawlins. But...my mother and older sisters all knew what they were doing.
As I got older I realized that busy kitchen would have been a great training ground for me to learn how to prepare food and serve it--especially for guests. I had watched my mom over the years turn out what looked like effortless meals, countless dishes for needy people, and huge banquets for every holiday including her own birthday and Mother's Day celebrations.
But watching just didn't cut it. As President Kimball used to teach, we have to practice or we loose the skills we once knew. It's not enough to know or have done it at one time in our lives, we need to keep at it in order to do our very best.
I'm sure Ross was dismayed when we got married and my cooking skills produced some pretty pathetic meals. What I knew and could do, I had learned at college while cooking during my week of the monthly duty wheel rotation at my apartment.
However, Ross' mother was a horrible cook, so he didn't complain. He ate what was prepared--burned, underdone, tasteless, or just plain crappy. And the few times he REALLY didn't like it, he just said, "You don't ever have to fix this again." A subtle way to tell me it wasn't so good, but not in any way that would hurt my feelings.
Ross always thanked me for preparing the meal--channeling Grandpa Huggins who said the same words to my mother every time he rose from the table. But Ross would click an invisible button in his mid-section before he said the same thing. It usually made me laugh. Ross was grateful to have a meal put on the table before him. He didn't pick or complain that wasn't what he wanted. Over time, my skills got better, and I could actually cook some things pretty well.
But cooking for company put me into a dither! It didn't matter if it were for visiting family, the missionaries, or guests at a holiday dinner. (THAT was far and few between, but it did happen very occasionally.) It would seem I lost my mind and couldn't focus on anything until the whole menu was completely ruined.
Ross knew that I struggled and that there was usually some kind of disaster. So, when a regular dinner at home turned out perfectly, Ross would say, "Too bad we're not having company tonight." And that would assuage my paranoia that I couldn't ever cook a decent meal. Because there were lots of fiascos.
For example: Invited my supervisor at the library for dinner to reciprocate after she had fed Ross and me an authentic Italian dinner with homemade, hand tossed pasta. I thought a roast would be easy. Nada! It was totally scorched and dry. Plus I'm sure the rest of the meal was also not so great either. I was embarrassed to say the least.
Here's another one: totally forgot the potatoes for Christmas dinner when both the Nichols and Huggins grandparents came to Christmas dinner in 1976. We sat down to eat--no potatoes. Didn't just forget to put them on the table--they hadn't even been peeled or cooked!
When we were in Sweden the missionaries came to dinner for a menu of Mexican food. I always steamed the pintos and made refried beans from scratch. That day I must have salted the beans TWICE while preparing them, once while steaming and once while mashing them. They were soooo salty we couldn't eat them. Probably gave the Elders hypertension, as well!
I could go on and on. And with each incident that I remember, my cheeks burn all over again.
So, I learned early on that taking food to Church dinners always meant I would be taking it home again. It would sometimes be the ONLY dish that had anything left in it--a LOT left in it. And there were other occasions that my dish was held "in reserve" in the church kitchen because the other women were such good cooks, theirs were the ones that got served. After that happened enough times and my next assignment had been baked potatoes with the same result--I found them in the kitchen untouched-- I always made sure my contribution was bread or salad dressing, or some other food item that I didn't care whether or not it got used.
And taking a meal to someone--not my forte. Though I always accepted the assignment anyway and then jockeyed with my Visiting Teaching partner for me to take the "incidentals" like salad and bread, dessert maybe. I could do pretty good desserts.
After years and years of feeling bad because I had never morphed into Chef Molly Mormon, I finally understood THAT wasn't my personal ministry. I had come to know just exactly WHAT my personal ministry is--and it doesn't have to do with food!
However, I set myself up for failure once again. The young couple across the street who is in our ward had their baby on Thanksgiving Day instead of Martin Luther King Day, and the babe will be in the hospital for a long time. When the "take in dinner" sheet came to Primary in the RS binder, I saw one of the days on the calendar was one I was going to be at home. I thought, "How hard can this be? I will fix two of my best dishes--homemade potato soup and hot chicken sandwiches--include a tossed salad with some extras and round it out with some pumpkin pie still in the freezer from Thanksgiving. A snap! I can handle this."
The appointed time came. Knowing I was going to have lunch with Cathy Callahan at 11 am that day, then go straight to the temple in the afternoon, I made the guts for the chicken sandwiches the night before AND peeled the potatoes and put them in cold water in the fridge and took the pie out of the freezer to the refrigerator to thaw. I also cut up some of the extras for the salad I would be tossing just before I took the meal across the street. Is all I had to do the next day was unwrap and fill the crescent dough to bake the sandwiches and make the soup. All doable to be done between five and six p.m.
But at my Primary meeting the night before, the assignment fell to me to pick up, the day of the dinner, a dozen bottles of sparkling fruit juice for our Christmas offering to Primary workers. Oh, and that was compounded by not getting up before five a.m. as usual because I had waked up that morning at 2:30 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep. Primary on my mind after our meeting the night before and much to do to get ready for our new Primary year. So, I got out of bed and went upstairs to work at the computer for a few hours. THEN I went to bed. NOT a good thing to do, but by then I was really tired and needed some shut-eye to function.
Here again is proof of that old adage I learned as a young mother in Relief Society: "an ounce of morning is worth a pound of afternoon"--ala Daryl Hoole. I used up my morning ounces, and there weren't enough pounds left to do my assignment to take dinner to our neighbors the way it should have been done.
First it was too much drive time in the car. Johnstown down to Westminster up to Fort Collins then down to Loveland with stops in between to cover the bases for some other stuff that needed to be done, in addition attending the temple. TRAFFIC on I-25. I didn't get home until 5:15 p.m.!
Right off the bat I started to panic. Then instead of focusing on the best things to do in priority, I decided to start the potatoes to steam. The steam valve is so old and the rubber so hard, it cracked and fell right into the pan. FREAK! I put the pan on the burner and wondered if the whole thing would blow up like happened to Lois once and she had a mess on her kitchen ceiling. Then I started sautéing the onions in butter. Decided to toss the salad. Put it into a bag, but not back into the fridge. Rolled out the crescent dough and pinched it into squares and got the melted butter and bread crumbs ready to dip the tops into.
Oh, no! There is a huge amount of steam coming out of that open hole.....but how long should I let the potatoes cook without the steam inside the pressure cooker? I glanced over at the onions in butter. The onions were carmelized and the butter was brown! No! No! No! Take it off the burner, take out the too-brown onions, add more butter and try to get that melted for the addition of the flour.
Terrible smells of scorching food--and I knew exactly what had happened. The water had burned off, and the potatoes were cooking right on the bottom of the pan--burning is the better word. I looked at the clock. Too late to start more potatoes. It was already inching toward six thirty. And the sandwiches were ready to come out of the oven.
I cooled the pressure cooker and opened the lid. Very few potatoes managed to escape death by scorching. I spooned out the ones I could, carefully lifted out some more and tried to slice off the burned parts so I could make the potato puree. Very little puree!
So, I made the white sauce base with flour and cooked it with milk. Tasted like hot milk with a little bit of potato flavoring. What to do? So, I melted more butter, made more flour paste with that and used the hot soup to make a thick base and added it to the thin, watery, watery soup. It actually turned out pretty good with those additions!
It was nearly seven p.m. when I called Aubrey and told her I was FINALLY coming across the street. It had been more than an hour since I had called and told her the sandwiches took about half and hour to bake and I would be over then. So, I put the soup into a quart jar, the sandwiches on the cute Christmas platter I had bought at the thrift store and scrubbed up, the now limp salad with croutons and cheese baggies, and two pieces of pumpkin pie on a red plastic candy dish I had purchased at the dollar store onto a cloth covered cookie sheet and embarrassingly and apologetically skulked across to the Wilsons. Aubrey graciously thanked me for bringing supper when she was probably thinking in her mind what kind of woman as old as I am could run into so many cooking roadblocks and deliver a little meal for two people nearly two hours late.
Too bad there was no assignment on that sheet in the RS binder to set the table for the take-in meal. Now that is something I learned really well all those years ago as the youngest. Over the years I have collected table cloths plus fancy, plain, and unusual plates and dishes because I DO love to set the table. So, I can still set a pretty terrific table that looks gracious and inviting for a sumptuous repast cooked to perfection. Sometimes that good looking table even downplays a meal that isn't so great either. My mother always used to say, "Make the table look inviting. Even if there isn't a lot to eat or it's not fancy, the food will taste good anyway."
Now I have yet another memory of good intentions going awry. I couldn't believe all the disasters for that meal. If it could go wrong, it did go wrong. So, that is why I'm sticking to a pen and paper for my personal ministry...
Because some things NEVER change!
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