WEThurs August 21, 2014 – I’m Not a Misogynist

Today’s challenge: It astonishes me to report that the TV reality show Survivor is in its 29th season this fall.

• Welcome to the island. Have you ever considered taking part in a reality show? Do you even watch them?
• Where do you draw the line as regards your creature comforts?
• Are you off the grid? Is this by choice or by circumstance? Tell us about the joys and/or heartaches of life in the slow lane.

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In response to Maggie’s challenge I think I’ll talk about the creature comforts concept using an old post of mine along with some new exposition.

In case you’ve never read any of my stories, I’m a desert rat. I love the desert. I love the heat. I love camping in the desert. My oldest son has the same opinion of the desert as I do. The other kids aren’t as excited about camping in the desert, but they’ve all spent time there and know how to survive.

This picture (from Death Valley) shows you the environment you’ll find in our camping areas. One concession I’ve made to my “creature comforts” is that this old body just doesn’t move as it used to. I can still sleep on the ground if I have to, but I have a hard time getting up. As a result I now drag a cot out on our camping trips.

When you camp in the desert, you have to know how to survive on the least amount of water – there ain’t a lot of that wet stuff out there and one of the things you learn is how to clean your dishes after you eat. Many people will find this hard to believe, but sand works wonders in cleaning dishes.

Have you ever heard of sand blasting? Have you ever used sandpaper to smooth or clean something? The concept is the same. Sand cleans things very nicely. When you’re camping in the desert, have only a limited supply of water, and need to clean your dishes – use sand.

My sons had camped with me many times but, for some reason, my older daughter never got around to going with us and had not learned anything about desert survival. One summer, many years ago, I told her that my friend and I were going camping and she said she’d like to go along. As a parent, I felt it was my responsibility to teach her survival techniques because I’d done the same for my sons. I talked to her after we set up camp and said, “One of the things you have to learn is how to cook and clean up in the desert.”

When she agreed, I said, “I’ll cook dinner tonight and you and Bob will clean up. Tomorrow, you can cook and we’ll clean up.”

Realizing this was a learning experience for her, she said okay and we had a fun afternoon riding dirt bikes, drinking, telling stories, shooting, and generally having all the fun you would expect on a desert trip.

I don’t remember what I fixed for dinner, but we enjoyed it while sitting around the campfire. After dinner, I led her down into a dry stream bed, pointed to the sand, and said, “That’s how you clean the pots and pans.”

Blank look from her. I bent down, put a handful of sand into the pot, and started rubbing it around. As I backed off and she took my place cleaning the pot, I explained how the cowboys used sand all the time to clean everything.

I took a picture of her cleaning one of the pans and then she asked the question I was expecting. “What about the dishes and silverware?”

I said, “Oh, Bob’s taking care of that. You just get the pots and pans clean.”

What she didn’t know was that Bob was, indeed, washing the dishes and silverware except…

I had cooked dinner on a Coleman stove on the tailgate of my truck and Bob had put a pan on there, filled it with water, let it get good and hot, added some dishwashing liquid, and was cleaning everything else in a somewhat more modern manner.

After she finished scrubbing all the pots and pans, we walked back into camp where I took them and said, “Here, let Bob finish those.” That’s when she saw the hot, soapy dishwater and…

I wasn’t her favorite person for a while.

WEThurs Cooking – According to My Family

Today’s challenge: By the rules or by the seat of your pants? Tell us your approach.

• Write about your comfort level with following the rules and guidelines. Do you kick at the traces or are you happy to pull the cart as commanded?
• Write about your cooking style. A dash of this, and handful of that? Or is it all about precision in your kitchen?
• When it’s time to prepare a dish, what is your specialty? Bonus marks for recipes!

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Maggie, I am so glad you posted this challenge because it gives me a chance to introduce you to my form of civil disobedience — I don’t always follow the rules. Any rules. Including challenge rules.

After writing that I started thinking about the cooking done in my family over the years and the difference in styles and abilities.

My mother cooked good, wholesome meals for our family: most were boiled or roasted. She made a few things that were really great.  I can particularly remember her spaghetti and meatballs, chop suey, and tacos. She always had me in the kitchen helping her and I learned all the basics of cooking from her.

My dad never cooked until we moved to San Bernardino Road where we had a brick barbecue. His menu on that consisted of only hot dogs and hamburgers. I don’t remember him ever cooking a steak or chicken on the grill and I have no idea when he started cooking for real. When mom got too sick to care for herself he evidently picked up the cooking tasks. He concentrated on meat and potatoes in nearly every meal. He also bought a lot of frozen dinners that he could just heat and eat. He cut out recipes from papers and magazines all the time and collected over a thousand recipes. He was not an experimenter; he followed the recipe exactly. As a result he had a lot of variety in his diet, but he could never make something without having the recipe in front of him.

Grandma Webb never let anyone in the kitchen while she was cooking. Even Mom would ask before venturing into Grandma Webb’s kitchen and then she would rapidly come back out. I remember that I liked everything she cooked, but can’t remember exactly what she served. Being a farm household, the table was always loaded with meat, potatoes, veggies, and dessert.

Grandma Maxwell, however, held more to Pennsylvania traditions in that the kitchen was the center of the family. Her kitchen/dining room was larger than any three other rooms in the house combined. Again I can’t remember anything in particular that she fixed, but I do remember that I liked most of it.

My first wife, Robin – what to say about her expertise? When we lived together in Paris she was attending the famous Cordon Bleu and each night she would experiment on me by fixing whatever she learned in class that day. She had also lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and learned a lot of Brazilian and Portuguese cooking. She was great at fixing gourmet dishes. When we lived in NC, however, she was not up to fixing daily meals for just the two of us and she got bored easily. I’m ashamed to admit I was a typical male-chauvinist when we were married. I worked, she didn’t, so when I came home from work I expected to be fed. I honestly don’t remember ever cooking while Robin and I were together.

My middle wife, Mickey, like mom, cooked good, solid, “stick-to-your-ribs” meals. She made more Mexican food and was willing to experiment occasionally. When she did that it was either great or – well, like when made tacos using beef tongue – YUCK! For whatever reason, I don’t remember her ever teaching the kids how to cook. The times I remember the kids helping in the kitchen were those when I was cooking. Mickey and I did NOT cook well together. Any time we were in the kitchen together we got in each other’s way and usually ended up in an argument.

My last wife, Debbi, got off work at five and her old boyfriend got off at seven or eight and she was expected to have dinner ready. When we got together she was shocked the first night when she got home from work and found dinner ready for her. We traded off cooking as long as we were together. She was not really into gourmet or “fancy” cooking but she had an extremely wide array of items she could prepare. She also experimented a lot in the kitchen, sometimes mixing a bunch of things I would never think of and ending up with something really great. I don’t remember ever seeing her use a recipe, she just thought about what she wanted to fix and did it. She and I worked well in the kitchen together and could both work on different things or even help each other with one thing with no arguments.

In case you haven’t noticed, there is a National Family Day each year and there are usually ads all over the radio about the family eating together on that day. That made me start thinking about the following comparisons.

At Grandma Maxwell’s house everyone sat down to eat together. If there were a family get-together there would be one big table for the adults and one or two smaller tables for the kids. I remember when I graduated to the adult table and was soooo proud that I even stuck out my tongue at the kiddies at their table. (Yeah, I’m really a nice guy.) Dinner was always at six o’clock and everyone was expected to be there. If you weren’t there – you didn’t eat!

At Grandma Webb’s we all ate together. The time wasn’t fixed, but it was usually about an hour after Grandpa Webb, dad, and I returned from working in the fields. It just dawned on me that mom must have been bored silly during those summers. The men would go away during the day and she’d sit at home with Grandma Webb. Hmm, guess that’s pretty much what women did all the time in those days, huh? But mom was used to working and I now wonder how she spent her time and whether she ever got tired of doing “women’s” stuff.

When I was growing up mom and dad both worked. Mom eight to five and dad on rotating shifts, so he was there for dinner only about two-thirds of the time. Even though mom worked she, as the wife, was expected to fix dinner and have it on the table at six each evening. When she was late dad would fret and stew until she either told him to shut up or, “If you want this on the table at six, you get out here and fix it.” That always shut him up.

When dad wasn’t home mom usually let me sit in the living room and watch TV while eating dinner on a TV tray. TV dinners were a new thing and we ate a lot of them when dad wasn’t there. I remember dad making a big deal out of not eating TV dinners. I can’t remember what it was, but there was a time when one TV show attracted him and he actually sat in the living room one night a week and ate a TV dinner on a TV tray.

Mickey and I tried to have dinner each night with the entire family at the table. Easy when the kids were younger, but progressively harder as they grew up.

After I finished this I sent it to my oldest son, Greg, for his thoughts and he responded with:

I read that cooking document you sent. That’s cool. I never bothered to think about what our family’s eating habits were. Not only was it informative for me on a personal level, but it shows how the disintegration of evening “family time” has progressed and what has replaced it.

Start-Full sit down meals, then women in the workplace-quicker meals with flexible dining room time, television technology-brings less hearty/healthful meals to living room and dining room time is lessened, junk food and mass media-makes sit down meals special occasions, cyber space-too busy to eat, let alone set a table.

It was a little slice of Americana.