Reinhardt - Dishing with the Kitchen Virgin

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Id like to thank my mother for trying to teach me how to cook. She gave it her best effort, though I successfully resisted. Id also like to thank everyone who was a part of this collection, either with their stories, diets, recipes or humor. Without my friends and family, and readers of my columns, the book wouldnt have been possible.

Big thank-yous go to my wonderful and superprofessional agent, Ethan Ellenberg, and the talented and tireless staff at Kensington including those who design the great covers, the sales team and my excellent editor, Audrey LaFehr, who, like Ethan, believed I could write funny.

I appreciate my children, Niles and Lindsey, for enduring a mother whose face for the past couple of years has been plastered against a computer screen. Without their patience and understanding, Id be another would-be writer who had no time to place words on the page.

Finally, and as always, praise for the Read It Or Not, Here We Come Book Club members, especially Laurie Pappas, who founded the group and who actually reads EVERY selection. Her grace is limitless.

One last thing, Im grateful to the Asheville Citizen-Times for helping promote the books once theyre published. This includes Polly McDaniel (my editor), Tony Kiss (entertainment editor), and John Boyle (columnist), whove all done stories about the books.

Oh, and Webman Randy. If you need a great website, hes the ticket.

CHAPTER ONE

There Are No Pot Holders in Heaven

M y mama used to say she couldnt wait to die, not just because shed get to meet Jesus and Elvis, in that order, but also because it would finally mean never having to think up another meal.

Ill be trading my burned pot holders for a pair of smooth white wings, she cooed, the smell of onions frying in butter circling the room like a culinary halo. I cant wait to close that oven door for good.

Mama would groan and carry on as she flung open cabinets and slammed pots and pans onto the counter in preparation for yet another breakfast, lunch or dinner.

The only time I ever heard her cuss was while cooking or sewing, the latter of which she finally gave up, shoving her Singer in the attic after deciding the effort put forth didnt equal the end result. Since she was a stay-at-home mom, she was expected to carry on with the dinners and meal planning, as this was the sixties and seventies, in a town where the only fast-food restaurant was a Burger Chef until a McDonalds finally came to roost.

Cooking, while shed never fully admit it, drove Mama near-about crazy, the great effort and imagination of conjuring new ways to present her family of four a pretty-looking supper that didnt drain the life out of her and one that consisted of more than a single color. She hated nights when the colors didnt go right and she ended up with an entirely brown or orange meal.

Brown meals are an aesthetic disaster for anyone and usually consist of baked potatoes, country-fried cube steak, pinto beans and cabbage boiled way beyond the green and into a gummy beige that even the toothless can manage with ease. Lots of people from my part of the South cook green vegetation until its dog-fur brown.

Topping off one of her brown meals with chocolate ice cream, and Mama would glance at the table and all but cry out, Why cant I seem to fix a dinner that has more than one color scheme?

She did the same wailing on nights she made macaroni and cheese and served it with cantaloupe and a salad with Seven Seas French Dressing. She might choose peach sherbet to go along with it all and then once again wonder why she couldnt produce a dinner in multiple hues.

Everythings orange, shed say, throwing her glistening hands, coated with the sheen of various food greases, into the air.

My daddy was an excellent sport about it. He knew if he drank enough bourbon after work, anything she made would be edible.

Two or three highballs or a few Bloody Marys, and Id moan and sigh with every bite I took, he said. Thats the secret all cooks know. Get em sauced before you serve them.

When Mama first got married at the tender age of 19, my Granny, her mother-in-law, nearly fell over dead upon learning Mama didnt know how to make a tossed salad. She learned fast, and we grew up on bland, nearly clear iceberg lettuce served with a couple of slices of cucumber and a tomato wedge covered in a Thousand Island dressing made from swishing together Dukes Mayonnaise and Hunts Ketchup. If Mama felt creative, shed toss in some pickle relish.

While her meals were often strange and brown, she did manage to give us a multiple vitamin every day for good measure. She knew she wasnt the best cook or the worst on our street and town, but I know it made her mad every Wednesday when the newspaper hit the curb and she unfolded the page to see the chosen woman occupying the most popular and coveted feature, the Cook of the Week, grinning in all her glory and highfalutin recipes.

This Cook of the Week feature came about in the days long before Martha Stewart marched onto the scene with her domestic dictatorship, giving everybody equal opportunity to shine after a White Sale or decent pie baking.

Those women in our small but richy hometown who were lucky enough to be selected as food writer Polly Palmers Cook of the Week were put on a pedestal, like cakes rising in their sugar petticoats from a crystal stand.

The paper devoted an entire inside page to the gloating these women spouted and the bloating their recipes invariably caused. The staff photographer at the Daily Times would bustle into the womans home and take all sorts of photos of her gadding about her hearth and home.

The words were always sappy and flattering, but none quite as dripping with inflated compliments as the time our towns former Playboy centerfold, Tina Ramirez, whod married a radiologist, wound up Cook of the Week, when everybody and his mama knew the only thing shed ever greased were her teats poolside at the country club. No way shed ever plunged those long manicured hands into a tub of Crisco or risked burning her perfect face over a skillet of popping Wesson oil.

Oh, but the story Polly Palmer wrote made her sound like some sort of curvaceous culinary princess. It was the only time the Cook of the Week was photographed lounging by the pool, her 36DDDs oiled like a turkey breast as she lifted in toast her favorite beverage, Tinas Tornado, a concoction of vodka and liqueur she frothed and then topped with a menacing cone of whipped cream.

Theyll blow you away, the photo caption read beneath Tinas teeny gold bikini. The picture was black and whiteit being in the seventies and allbut Id seen her in that swimsuit and knew it was as gold as the dome on Georgias capitol building.

Tina is the quintessential (I had to go look that up, being only 12.) woman, and the kind of goddess and creature of the kitchen and manor we are all just dying to be, Polly gushed in her column. Shes got substance (what Polly meant is money), a great little figure (her knockers) and a set of twins anyone would be proud to call their own.

My sister and I wanted to know if the paper meant her boobies or her wild hellion sons, who always tinkled through the country club fence and right onto the golf course. Those boys were junior devils sent up on a mission of torment. Nobody liked them.

The article went on and on with Pollys blatherings.

Mrs. Ramirez epitomizes what wife and mother mean, only she takes it much further up the ladder and volunteers as a room parent, was voted Sexiest Wife of the Year, by the VFW Post 352 as well as the Moose Lodge, both in our fair city and two towns south of here in neighboring counties. This is solid evidence of her beauty and far-reaching domestic skills.

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