This recipe starts in your refrigerator, 4 days before payday and 2 weeks after you bought Big Groceries. First, channel the spirit of my Scottish grandfather. Become grumpy and parsimonious. Then
Chop 1 onion and put it in the bottom of a large pot with some oil. Cook the onion until it's soft.
*this step is to fool bystanders into thinking you're making something amazing and delicious, because nothing smells better than a frying onion.*
Go into your fridge and take out everything that isn't a condiment or an uncooked egg. I mean EVERYTHING. That little cup of tuna salad, the boiled egg, the custard cup of fruit cocktail, the sad leftover half cubed steak. Rice, pasta, potato salad. 3 green beans, a quarter head of lettuce, and the bottom scrapings of the jar of pesto you can't bring yourself to throw away. Dump it all in the pot. Do not think twice, you are pretending to be my Scottish grandfather who never threw anything away. Dump it all. If you have a ketchup bottle with just an inch in the bottom, throw that in as well. BBQ sauce, sprouting garlic, a wrinkled potato. It all goes in. Chop up the big stuff.
Then add a large can of diced tomatoes, and a can of kidney beans.
Allow this delicate melange of ingredients to simmer and meld into the flavor of the stuff in the bottom of the garbage disposal. Don't taste it. Just trust me...don't.
Now is when you season it. Add as much black pepper as you think you 'd like, then add some more. Add some red pepper for heat, and paprika because it excels in hiding the flavor of tuna salad.
Then, feed this to your family for an entire week, telling them that they won't get anything else to eat until it's all gone.
This is the defining recipe of my childhood.
5 comments:
ack!!
i like how y'all are now a Conglomerate, so i don't actually know whose childhood this was.
have you ever read Ruth Reichl's "Tender at the Bone," p.s.? her mom had a similar approach to both hosting and cuisine, apparently; she was a real pip.
food writers fascinate me. i have the impression that most of them grew up with either really spectacular or really awful cooks. MFK Fisher seems to have been shaped quite a bit by her "food is not for enjoyment" Puritanical grandmother as much as anything else.
My father thought that having a pot of soup simmering on the back burner of the stove was the best way to get through winter.
The Sunday roast or poultry bones supplied the broth and meat.
Every night after dinner whatever was left over went into that pot including the water the potatoes were cooked and even...... it still makes me shudder...the water from the asparagus.
By Friday nobody would touch that soup but him and yet on Sunday night he'd be starting all over again.
I don't make soup!
Elizabeth I totally relate. I don't eat leftovers!
Ok I wrote that one. I haven't figured out how to seperate us, and I keep forgetting to sign the finished post. Oh well.
oh wow.
my husband's family calls that Musgo Stew - throw everything in your fridge that "must go" into the pot.
suddenly, my cullinary upbringing doesn't feel so lonely anymore.
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