Sunday Dinner is over. It must be Sunday afternoon nap time. Gotta love a good Sunday afternoon nap. It is quiet. There was rarely anything good on TV Sunday afternoons - unless you wanted to watch sports, and that was never my thing.
But I did enjoy Sunday night TV. Remember Wonderful World of Disney? Only those of a certain age will remember Wonderful World of Disney with Tinkerbell flying all over the screen and lighting the Magic Castle. The magic began with that intro!
And Sunday evening suppers were almost always roast beef sandwiches and tomato soup. Roast beef with mayonnaise and dill pickles and Campbell's tomato soup made with milk. I didn't even know you could make it with water until I was a grown up. I think I actually prefer it made with water, but homemade cream of tomato soup is actually the best. But that's not what we grew up on. We'd have TV trays and watch Disney while we ate our sandwiches and soup. I was never a crush a bunch of crackers into my soup kind of girl either. That was just gross! I was always a one cracker at a time sort of girl, and try to cut it with my spoon so I ended up with 4 smaller squares of cracker soaked in soup. Ah...memories...
Now Monday evenings were almost always chow mein made with the last of the roast beef leftovers. Some of you may be thinking, "Huh?" right about now, but it's true. Mother would take the roast beef and cube it up along with some of the stock from Sunday. She would heat that up and then put in a can of Chinese vegetables. Do they still sell those? I haven't ever bought one to my recall, so I don't know. She may have added some soy sauce, but we didn't grow up with things like fresh ginger in the house to add. We'd serve the chow mein over the crispy chow mein noodles in the can, and that was often Monday night supper. If we had anything else with that, I don't recall it. Maybe we'd have banana salad that night, but I don't even know that for sure.
Banana salad, you ask? Google banana salad, and you won't find images of what I have in mind. Even if you Google banana and peanut butter salad, you won't see images of this. Mother would take a banana and slice it longways. Then she would spread peanut butter down the cut side and put the 2 halves back together before slicing into bite size pieces. We didn't really ever have banana and peanut butter sandwiches like on Sesame Street, but we would occasionally have banana and peanut butter salad.
I don't recall any other routine weeknight dinners, but we often had hamburgers and french fries on Saturday nights. The Carol Burnett Show and Jackie Gleason would be on TV. I always loved the Carol Burnett show, but the Jackie Gleason show was only ok sometimes. But Carol was always good. And if it was a night when Tim Conway got Harvey Korman laughing, that was The BEST!
But back to the hamburgers and french fries. Mother was always on hamburger duty. We really didn't grill outside much, and even in later years when we would occasionally, Daddy wasn't on grill duty. That would be me more so than anyone. But growing up, Mother would cook the hamburgers. And she'd almost always use the electric skillet. Electric skillets were sort of like pressure cookers. You couldn't do life without one. If it died, you were out shopping the next day to replace it. You just were. Mother would cook the patties and then toast the buns. Sometimes she would toast the buns with butter, but oftentimes, they were just toasted in the grease from the burgers. (Like I said, the health department has banned this blog. If you are reading it now, it must be without their knowledge.) She'd only toast the bottom bun, but warm the top bun by sitting it on top of the toasting bottom. That extra touch always made the burgers taste so good!
The french fries were Daddy's gig. We'd use the frozen crinkle cut fries. Daddy would use the electric skillet if it was a night when we'd fried fish in the skillet first, but if it was a burger night, he'd heat the oil on the stove, cause Mother was using the electric skillet for the burgers and buns. He also had a favorite, long-handled, slotted spoon. I can remember more than once when Daddy would call me to the stove to show me how to "feel" the french fries for doneness. That old slotted spoon gave him the best measure of the crispness he was looking for. His slotted spoon never let us down. Those fries came out great every time.
Sigh. I am really waxing nostalgic, aren't I?
Speaking of fish, whenever we would fry fish growing up, it was always perch. And Mother would bread the perch with cornmeal only. We didn't make hushpuppies. We'd just have the perch fried in cornmeal and french fries. I remember the perch would often curl up as it cooked, too.
One more memory, and I will close. About a year after Mother passed away, I was on a business trip to Bentonville, Arkansas - home of Walmart. I had multiple memories of Mother on that trip - dogwoods in bloom, for one. But the food on that trip also reminded me of Mother. We ate at Culver's, and the butter burgers with the toasted buns brought back many memories. And then we went to a place in Rogers, AR, a town that butts up to Bentonville, for catfish. The real name is Catfish John's, but we could never remember that name, so we'd call it Gus's House of Cod - cause that was easier to remember? Or maybe I have the names mixed up? Anyway we went there for lunch one day on that same trip, and guess how they prepared their fish? They rolled it in cornmeal just like Mother. If I recall right, I even got perch that day along with crinkle cut fries. It was like Mother was right there with me again on that trip.
I guess that's all for now. Not sure how any of these stories would quite fit into the family recipe collection for my future daughter-in-law, A, but perhaps if she's reading this, and the health department hasn't closed down her Internet access, she'll at least catch a glimpse of the simple, loving family she is joining in only two short months.
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