Thursday, August 27, 2009

Memories of food



My Paternal Great-Grandmother (Grandma Wood) would always bring boxes and boxes of Entenmann’s baked goods tied with string from the outlet store where she would stop on her way to our house. My favorite was the chocolate covered doughnuts. I loved them straight from the freezer, which is where she stored them when we went to her house.

Grandma always had a big glass cookie jar* on her countertop with her homemade sugar cookies in there. I can’t remember ever going to her house without those cookies being there. They were the best after a long day swimming in the pool! She must have made thousands of those cookies!

My paternal grandmother (Nana) would always burn her cookies when she would bake them, she always made chocolate chip cookies, and she always burned them. She wouldn’t throw them out either, she said they were perfectly good. I remember taking a butter knife to the bottom of them. They still tasted burnt. Her cookies are probably the reason I still don't like chocolate chip cookies much to this day. Nana made the best eggplant parmesan ever though.

My maternal grandfather (Grampy) would always take us to McDonalds for Chicken Nuggets when they came to town to visit.

When we went to Grampy and Grammie’s house, we would always be sure to time the trek so we would be in time for breakfast! Grampy made the best fried eggs! Along with Bacon, sausage patties, home fries and baked beans. The homemade toasted bread was the icing on the breakfast. Grammie always had a Tupperware container in the fridge filled with all different jars of jams and jellies.

One little weird thing about me is that I have always loved my eggs over medium, but I don’t like to eat the white that is immediately around the yolk. I would cut the edges of the white off and eat those, and then I would open the top of the egg and dip the yolk with my toast, and I would leave the middle on my plate. Grampy always used to eat it up for me so Grammie wouldn’t yell at me for leaving it. Nowadays, my tummy doesn’t like me to eat the egg whites at all. Fortunately, my husband will eat them sometimes. It’s funny because if he doesn’t I feel like I am being wasteful. I think it’s so sweet that he eats them like Grampy used to 

My dad used to go diving a lot when we were young. Pretty much every weekend during the late spring and all summer we had the fruits of his labor. They would come home with enough fish to cover the front lawn. My mom would fry it up with just simple seasoned flour and Crisco. That fish was to die for. It was so good, I would sometimes wake up in the night and eat it cold from the zip bag. Then there was the conch that she made into fritters, or that dad made into conch salad. Plenty of hushpuppies. Fresh corn on the cobb. Florida lobster – they would bring dozens of them home during the season. One year we spent a week in the keys on a houseboat and we actually got sick of lobster. I never thought that would ever be possible. I’d like to do that again!

I loved going to Aunt JoJo’s house with her luxurious air conditioning and she would make honey mustard chicken, or our very favorite Chicken Cordon Bleu. I even ate calves liver coated in oatmeal at her house once that was very tasty.


Charlene

*When Grandma passed away, all of us girls got one of the cookie jars in the set. I also inherited her dining room set, where our family ate meals at her table for more than 40 years.

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