A phrase that to this day strikes fear into the hearts of my brothers, sisters, and I: “Grandma is cooking dinner.” Now, don’t jump to the conclusion that the stories I am about to tell are fabricated, over-exaggerated accounts. I present you with the accurate descriptions of the nauseating, utterly atrocious meals that my family and I have forced down our gullets year after year. These are the kinds of stories you hear about but are rarely true; like that one time my Grandma was making a soup that called for “five whole tomatoes” and five lucky dinner guests were each ladled a huge floating tomato in their bowl. Another time, a recipe for lemon chicken didn’t specify how to prepare the lemons, and so my grandma stuffed the chicken with more than six whole, unpeeled, un-sliced lemons. If you doubt the validity of these stories, I will have no other choice than to call my grandma and tell her I am sending a friend over for dinner; then you can see, or taste (if you can call it tasting), for yourself. But if you’re smart you should just content yourself with listening. There is no need to subject your intestines to such alchemy.
One of the first dinners I remember at Grandma’s was the Christmas Eve dinner she prepared for my family and all my cousins. I like to refer to that dinner as “the race for the saltines.” You see my Grandma had constructed this heterogeneous swamp of a stew. I think it was primarily lentils, but then again you can never be quite sure. I remember the pride that radiated from my Grandma’s face as she set the big pot of black stinky mush in the middle of the table. And we all met her with equal enthusiasm….for the three lonely packets of saltines that were meant to be dunked in the stew. My cousins, sisters, and I looked around to assess our competition in the mad dash, and then all at once leaped for the precious crackers. I will never forget how my Grandma rebuked my Grandpa, because he had been the ring-leader in the ferocious dash.
My Grandma, in spite of all the complaints my Grandpa has regarding her concoctions, is positive that he simply doesn’t have a taste for gourmet, and that, in fact, she has every potential to be an accomplished chef. As such, she is assured that she possesses an uncanny ability to look at an already prepared dish and, without following a recipe, duplicate the meal flawlessly. So if you ever stumble across an old woman who is standing in line in a grocery store simply staring at a picture of some exotic dish, she could very well be my Grandma. One of the most disastrous outcomes of this habit of her’s was what I like to call the “bagged corpse.” She had seen a title on the front of some cooking magazine that guaranteed a moist chicken. The visual provided on the cover indicated that you must cook the bird in a paper bag. Although it may be a fine way to cook chicken, anything my Grandma uses her culinary skill to perfect results in catastrophe. I was watching TV in the living room, and I heard my mom politely listening as my Grandma went on and on about how cooking a chicken in a bag is the “only way to do it right,” and how she had “been cooking this chicken for three days in a bag.” We all assumed that she had never attempted this before and, of course, we were right. By the time she took the chicken out of the oven and placed it on the table, all that was left of that poor measly bird were its bones with charcoal remnants hanging in bunches where its flesh had been. But Grandma didn’t seem to notice, and she put it on the table in front of wide, afraid eyes. If I ever get stomach cancer, I will attribute it to the amount of carbon I gagged down during that meal.
There are other meals that hold a place in my memory, such as the cold, under- cooked salmon with cat hairs through and through, or the ever famous “Newberg stew,” consisting of chicken, sherry, sausage, clams, scallops, tomato sauce, prunes, and apricots. But the one that holds the most prominent place in my memory is the “prime rib torpedo.” My Grandma had read in one of her magazine articles that if you pour a cup of brandy over your prime rib and light it, the flavor of the gravy will be enhanced by the flames. By applying this knowledge logically, my Grandma came to the conclusion that if a little brandy brings out a little flavor, then naturally a lot of brandy would bring out that much more flavor. But, as usual, she was mistaken. My Grandpa, dad, and I were all watching TV in the living room. My mom was helping my Grandma in the kitchen when my Grandma lit the four cups of brandy she had poured over the prime rib. From the living room, we heard a big BOOM! and my mom’s agitated voice attending to my Grandma. Very startled, I turned to my Grandpa in horror. I was astonished to see that the expression on his face was utterly complacent, and he barely glanced twice when my Grandma burst through the living room to get a cold compress for her singed, still smoking eyebrows. Of course, this is what my grandpa lives with everyday, so why after all these years would he be fazed by any of it? He has learned how to steer clear of the kitchen, or “Grandma’s chemistry lab,” and I for one have chosen to follow in his footsteps and advise you to do the same.
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