Home Cooking

Probably the funniest thing about my mom is how she pronounces "potato." She changes every single sound of that first syllable, and comes up with a word pronounced roughly like "buh-TA-tuh." This led to hundreds of conversations in my life that went something like this:

"What are we having for dinner tonight?"

"Hamburger patties and baked buhTAtuhs."

"BuhTAtuhs? What on earth is a buhTAtuh?"

Silence. It's tough to rope mom in.

"Did you mean potatoes? Potatoes sound good. Can we have those instead of buhTAtuhs?"

But she would never dignify my merrymaking with a response.

Although I haven't done it much here, I get a lot of comedic mileage from making fun of my mom's cooking. I won't get into it much here, but it's a telling fact that most of my family thinks the food at Red Lobster is good.

Here's another mean thing that I did as a teenager:

Mom cooked up some sort of stew or casserole one night. I don't remember what it was -- only that it was a bunch of food scrambled together in a bowl. As soon as it was set in front of me, I put the bowl on the ground and said, "Here kitty kitty kitty."

It makes me laugh to recall this scene, but it would chap my hide in a big way if I ever had a kid who did that to me. And as I recall, she was pretty annoyed at it all.

Even though I make fun, I always ate every bite of food put in front of me. The one exception was a dish that she really liked, a Beef Stroganoff. The way she made it included a healthy portion of beets (aka the anti-food). I know a lot of people who claim to like beets, and I've seen them eat enough to believe that the really do. But I don't understand how they could really like them. Beets are the nastiest, most foul tasting root ever to grow beneath a weed.

When we were in New York, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny was enjoying a soup in a Russian restaurant one afternoon. It looked good, and I asked for a bite. I was completely unsuspicious of its purple color and even asked, "Is that cabbage?"

The bite went into my mouth, and I just enough time to say, "Yeah, that's pretty good," before the beet-aftertaste hit me. It was a little like someone puked in my mouth, but without the acidy burn that puke carries with it.

Yum.