Remembering Mom

Every time I eat a grapefruit, I think of my mom. When I was a young girl, she and I often ate grapefruit halves sprinkled with sugar. Today I skip the sugar. I also think of the fresh blueberries we had with cold milk and the soft-boiled eggs sitting in painted egg cups. It's funny that I should think of her in terms of food because she was not a good cook. But I did like what she made for breakfast--poached eggs, something I've never had anywhere else but in my mother's kitchen; oatmeal; and waffles made from scratch and in a waffle iron. Buttered toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar--something else I haven't had since I was a child, though I made it for my own child once in a while.

The other food items I associate with my mother are rhubarb crunch, which she made from a rhubarb plant that grew outside against the wall of the house, and iceberg lettuce with chives that I cut from a plant that grew outside too. Interesting that I bought a chive plant for the bay window in my kitchen a few days ago at Target.

One of her regular entrees was tuna casserole with corn flakes on top for a crunch. On Christmas Eve she would make Swedish meatballs--ground veal smothered in cream-of-mushroom soup. For my birthday, she would make a fruit salad with canned mandarin oranges, bananas, dates, apples, marshino cherries, canned fruit cocktail, and Cool Whip. And a few times on Christmas Day, she pulled out her mother's cast-iron pan and made foeden, a ball of dough seasoned with cardamon and rolled in sugar, a northern German delicacy.

Funny that I should so closely associate my mother with food, since she was not a cook and since meals were often stressful, my dad pouting and refusing to sit with us, or if he did, acting as if it was a big pain. The mind sure is a mystery.