Cook Book Wisdom

By the time we had kids, the Renken family Thanksgiving was firmly established in Columbia where my aunt Anne and uncle Tony, cousins Tracy and John, opened their gracious home to all comers, adorning the multiple tables with imaginative place cards and setting a glorious spread of food that only encouraged culinary one upmanship among the ever competitive Renken relatives, adding to the general merriment and the tendency to overfill one’s plate.

For several years, Lee and Ann ruled the roost as the only great grandchildren to my Granny.  This privileged position gave them their own bracket in the putting contest, access to the pinball machine in the basement, spots at the card table with Granny, books and art supplies from their doting great aunts, and finally, a chance to soak and steam in the hot tub before we bundled back into the car for the long ride home.  Oftentimes, the girls napped, awaking just as night fell and they could count the Christmas lights that had sprung like mushrooms since morning.

Ben was just three months when we made the trip his first Thanksgiving.  We left before daylight with the grand plan that the kids would sleep a goodly portion of the drive. Back then, almost everything closed for Thanksgiving, so there would be no distracting stops for pop or doughnuts or milk or coffee..just the necessities at the rest areas.  But Ben had a different plan.  He began screaming about Kansas City and continued unabated ‘til we reached our destination.  He was a cute kid and a big hit with his grandma, his aunts, and his granny, and I hoped all that attention would wear him out for the trip home.  No go.  He was nothing if not persistent and wore US all out with his yelling until just north of Kansas City.  As holidays go, it was something less than idyllic.

But I digress.  

One year my uncle Steve rolled out the first edition of the Renken’s Recipes to Die For Thanksgiving 1992. Family get togethers were never quiet: I can remember my uncles castigating announcers, the players, and the officials...on a televised game.  The kitchen at my aunt’s was an open air soapbox of suggestions, despite the fact that each family had already had their say about the menu by virtue of the dish they’d contributed.  There was lots of good natured devil’s advocacy, but at some point in the afternoon, voices would be raised in something pretty darned close to an actual disagreement.

Most of the recipes contain a fair share of editorial content…..

From Steve, regarding “The Best Baked Beans”:

I’m not kidding; these really are the best.  They are far better than anything Liz ever thought about.

From Liz’s corner: “Liz’s Most Requested Baked Beans”.

From Steve, about Liz’s recipe: “You will notice that no one claims these are the best: they are just the most requested.  Probably by Terry and what choice does he have?”

Some recipes are quite brief:

Tim’s Beaver Tail

Take one beaver tail and hold over open flame until rough skin blisters.  Remove from heat. When cool, peel off skin, roast over coals or simmer until brown.

Serves 86

Or this one:

Hard-boiled Eggs

By Laura

Mark’s note: Most of you know that Laura does not have a large cooking repertoire.  However, at this one she is great and you won’t mess it up either.

2 eggs in the shell

4 cups water

1 medium saucepan.

Place eggs in saucepan. Add water and bring to a boil.  After three minutes of boiling, fish one egg out on a spoon and carry to the sink.  Halfway to the sink, drop the egg (accidentally) on the floor.  If it oozes on impact, cook remaining egg one more minute before eating and after cleaning up the floor.

But the recipes I turn to the most often are my mom’s.  Some of them are dog eared and stained, fragile to the point of illegibility. But I keep them for sentiment’s sake, even though those recipes have long since been committed to memory.  

Included in the Recipes to Die For are some of the comfort foods of my childhood, like the Raisin Bars, which my mom made at least once a week for my father’s lunch. I loved the combination of plump, sweet raisins after their bath in boiling water and the layer of sweet frosting atop the spicy cookies.  Or the multiple Jello recipes: the cherry jello with bing cherries that was my favorite, although I also like sliced oranges in lemon jello (not mandarin oranges!) and the apple grape jello with crunchy apples and green seedless grapes.  Yes,I am a kid of the Jello generation.

Some of the notes are windows into my mom’s kitchen after I was grown: the Mulled Wine we  would enjoy during winter visits just before bedtime (Good in cold weather and decidedly beneficial if one has the cold or the flu, ), the Hearty Corn Chowder (I use the microwave and make this in a 4 quart Corningware dish.  Good for a winter supper), the Caramel Corn (This is yummy and freezes well) or the Apple Butter in a Crock Pot (This tastes wonderful on hot toast and makes your house smell wonderful while it is cooking).

There are little scraps of paper with random recipes stuck throughout my cookbooks, like the Salsa Cruda with the addendum: I used three little hot peppers. It gets hotter the longer it “ages”.  I used your canned tomatoes.  Easy & yummy with tortilla chips. Every time I bake a Mrs. Peters’ coffeecake, I hear her admonition: Check with a toothpick for doneness.  It is a horrible flop if underdone! The recipe is one I know by heart, but I repeat that phrase like a blessing every time I bake it.

At the very back of my hyperextended recipe box is an assortment of cards that have nothing to do with food and everything to do with life.  When my aunts (Anne and Liz) hosted our wedding shower, they handed out cards to the guests to fill out with their advice for a good marriage.  Forty years later, those words of cheer and wisdom still reside in my box.  My sister: Keep the plants off the windowsill! My mother-in-law: Just talk things over! My Granny: Recipe for marriage 1 woman, 1 man. 1 lb sense of humor, 2 lbs love, 3 ½ lbs. tolerance, Shut up! P. S. Had a big argument with my husband this morning! Ran out of sense of humor…

My granny is gone...and so is Uncle Steve, the witty curator of the Renken Cookbooks….and his brother, my father, though I am certain heaven is a spicier place with the three of them in residence.

My mom was always more of a listener...and the best....letting me chatter on endlessly about whatever was on my mind. So I treasure the little asides recorded in the cookbook, and the tattered recipes she shared as well as this advice from years and years ago about her happy marriage:

Good companionship and conversation...no secrets (almost) Train him right but don’t let him know you are doing it.

Lots of loving!! (with a giant balloon of an exclamation point)

Ma

Be Blessed this Thanksgiving …..

Thanks for the Memories...

If it were possible to poke that many candles in one cake, mine would have sixty-one.  But even though our family is plenty big enough to devour two cakes in one sitting with a couple of pieces left over for breakfast the next day (yes, that’s what we do...a la mode too), I’m not certain one can get 30+ candles lit and extinguished one, two, three, without entombing the cakes and frosting in a carapace of colored wax.  Maybe someday we will try it... in the back of a pickup, during harvest.  Without much wind.  Or flammable plates.

When you are sixty-one, your grandkids are still young enough to give giant hugs, make silly videos, and even tell you you’re the most beautiful grandma ever...hyperbole being standard operating procedure for grandchildren….Your children, on the other hand, are caught between a rock and hard place: if their mom is over sixty, it follows that, YIKES!   

It’s OK….I couldn’t get my mind around my parents turning sixty...and then seventy….either.  I still felt like the kid when I was pushing forty.

Good news, all.  You are fully certified responsible grownups and we are proud as we could be of your character, accomplishments, hopes and aspirations.  But...we do remember when you were younger...and sillier….and not as responsible, reliable, etc. etc. as you are today….

Our household was unpretentious, not bound by style, or convention...or routine...we bought shoes at Payless Shoes, jeans at John’s Bargain Barn, and a big night of entertainment was renting a VCR and movie in town and picking up a pizza...which was always cold by the time it had wended it’s way eight miles north and east on route O.  

It was years before the kids thought about consumer goods like fancy athletic shoes; growing up on a farm and going to school in Westboro probably inoculated them against that kind of materialism.  After all, the girls had a full complement of Barbies with customized eye makeup and a whole herd of My Little Ponies.  

And if books or toys or tormenting their little brother ceased to be entertaining, Lee and Ann could always go downstairs and sing along with the Judds at the top of their lungs.  Who needs karaoke?

Lee’s first word was “Be”, for baby, and it applied to Orange Baby as well as her baby sister. Annie had Blue Baby...we were literal rather than poetic with doll names.   I swear Ben’s first word was “HyVee”, but maybe that was the first word all three of the kids could read….even before .  

The girls were blessedly non-picky eaters, happy enough with eggs or hot dogs for supper, making it so much easier to pack meals during the busy seasons.  Combines were not family friendly, so it was several years before Ann could perch herself on a water jug, Lee on the fire extinguisher, and Ben on my lap or the armrest after supper.  We were young and flexible then.  

This contortionist act was rivaled only by the trips we sandwiched all five of us into the cab of the pickup.  Mind you, this was before the invention of quad-cabs, before car companies recognized that more than two people might want to ride together in a pickup, or that lots of families considered their pickup to be their second “car”. At any rate, most of our safety defying trips five across were local, undertaken on snowy days or icy days when the country roads were impassable for our Ford Econoline.  Plumped by multiple layers of coats, scarves, boots and coveralls, one of the girls would straddle the gear shift, then the other would squish in beside her (interestingly enough, the cries of ‘she’s touching me!’ ne’er were heard in the cab of the pickup….maybe because no one could breathe) and let the seat belt out enough to fit around both of them. .  Blake would elbow space to shift and shut his door, then, finally, Ben and I would launch ourselves into the remaining space, and yank the other door closed.  Only then would I pull the other seat belt around both of us…padded like climbers on Everest... and attempt to find the buckle underneath whichever sister was next door.  

This seating arrangement did not lend itself to long distance travel, but nonetheless, we drove out west of Grand Island at least twice to club calf sales, dragging our trailer behind and constantly running the defrost to offset the effects of all that respiration.  Bathroom breaks were matters of logistical significance. Strangely enough, I do not remember any of the kids complaining….perhaps they were suffocating or perhaps I couldn’t hear them over the wind and fan...but I recollect quite clearly that none of the calves we bought those two years ever won his class.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  After that we stayed closer to home...and bought black.

I know this sentiment was not shared amongst the kids at all times and at all places, but some of my best memories did involve our family road trips, whether it was an early morning trek on Thanksgiving morning to my aunt’s gracious home in Columbia, a re-enactment of the pioneers’ trail through Wyoming, or museum hopping in Washington, D.C.  I loved picnicking in parks, stopping at historical markers (all of them), wading in cold mountain rivers, and finding a movie theater that last night out.  I appreciated every time one of my patient kids would pose for yet another mountain vista.  I even liked packing…..

Good for a laugh from the safe distance of decades:  digging for Ann’s retainer in the trash of a McDonald’s at the Lake of the Ozarks; Lee’s bright red  Sally Jessy Raphael style glasses….a replacement frame the color of her mother’s face after Lee left her brand new glasses where Ann could sit on them; Ben, checking to see what I thought about shaving his head...after the fact.  Ann and Ben, wearing the signs ‘Drunk’ and ‘Deserter’ at Fort Kearney or playing ‘Jack and Diane’ on their way to school in the Neon...a big improvement from the days Lee and Ann shut him in the linen closet.  Lee and Ben, practicing parallel parking with the dualled up 1984 Ford diesel pickup, Ben directing his sister between the buckets of feed and bales of straw in the driveway.

Tense times: music contest, freshman wrestling, prom.

And, for this mom,the very best of times: a break from running the seeder while I listened to the events of that day after the bus brought the kids home. Long phone calls on the 888 phone number.  Late night talks in the kitchen when the rest of the family was sleeping.

Happy memories. Lucky mom.