Food
Monday, 24. December 2007, 00:15:53
There is a "Topic" in The Lounge Forum of Opera.com that to me is the most useful and best of all the topics in the Lounge.
It is called "Cooking Papa" the moderator, yours truly, is an excellent cook and shares many recipes. I consider myself to be a good to above average cook and have posted some recipes of my own as well as others on the Topic.
There is one recipe on the site that was posted by TogaOga that I keep looking at and drooling. I don't have a slow cooker but as soon as I get one I'm going to jump at this recipe. The only thing I hope to impart to you and have you remember if nothing else. If you eat food, you owe it to yourself to go to this site and look if not try out the many delicious looking recipes.
I can appreciate this site perhaps more than most people when I think back to living at home with my other siblings. There were seven of us; three boys and four girls. I was the second oldest having one older sister. As we grew up a little my mother turned over the cooking duties to we the children.
Now I could not have been expected to cook for the family since I was very busy working on the baseball field perfecting my ball playing skills. My two younger brother could not have been expected to cook either. They spent day after day involved in a serious "Ping Pong" tournament in our basement that lasted several years. My middle brother did take a turn once. I walked into the dining room just in time to see him standing over the rest of my brothers and sisters counting "1-2-3 all forks up...1-2-3 forks into food...1-2-3 forks to your mouth..." He was banned from being in charge of dinner after that. (He did become a highly decorated officer in the U.S. Army when he grew up.) He served in Viet Nam for 7 years and was wounded 6 times. That left my four sisters to share the duty.
I don't want to tell you that none of my sisters were good cooks. I really don't want to tell you that, so let me just say that even a brother can recognize that his four sisters were very pretty girls. They were also fairly smart. They worked out this rotating schedule of cooking for the family. When I say family what I really mean is siblings since I never saw either my mother or father eat a single thing that any of my sisters cooked. I knew one other thing about my sisters other than they were pretty. I knew that they would never have middle aged, overweight husbands. As long as their husbands took them out to eat a lot, they had a good chance of reaching middle age. Also I knew they would never be over weight since I could bank on the fact that they would probable skip dinner often.
They took turns cooking each day. In between arguing over who had the best recipe for boiling water they each cooked their very own specialty. My oldest sister's specialty was "Hamburger" I do feel a little guilty calling them "Hamburger" but that's what she told us they were. At the risk of igniting her fury for giving away her recipe I will tell you anyway how she made them.
She would take a package of chopped meant and scoop a handful sized by her mood at that moment. She then forms many balls of chopped meat then beat them with her fist until they came close to resembling patties. Next she placed them into a smoking frying pan until the patties stopped screaming then she turned them over and let them finish cooking until her soap operas were over. I must admit she served them with a little variety. Sometimes she served canned vegetables with them that were surprisingly well cooked. Other times she served the burgers with canned vegetables that were "Oops I forgot to cook the vegetables".
My older sister did have a nice way of folding the napkins and placing the eating utensils in neat order. She folded the napkin and placed the fork first then the other two needed eating utensils, the hammer and the chisel. Now in fairness to my sister her "Hambergurgham... well you know what I mean. They really weren't THAT much harder than a billiard ball. I never asked what we were having for supper. I would just ask who was cooking and I automatically knew what was being cooked.
My sister that was two years younger than me had a specialty of fried chicken. I never cared about chicken so I usually skipped dinner when she cooked. I did notice that she always put a tooth pick sticking into the top of the chicken. I never knew why but my best guess was that she was ribbing my older sister and showing her that her food was at least able to be penetrated.
My second youngest sister's specialty was spaghetti and sauce. She did a decent job when compared to the others. I didn't say a decent job just a decent job when compared. She had a weird way of eating her food. After serving us she would sit down and use her napkin to wipe all the sauce off each spaghetti noodle making a pile of spaghetti with no sauce before eating it. I use to wonder why she didn't just cook hers separate with no sauce. I later figured it out that it was hard enough to produce the spaghetti dish without confusing herself with a separate portion.
For the life of me I can't remember my youngest sister's specialty. As I remember it now I think her specialty was in convincing her older sisters that she had just cooked the day before.
Now you can start to imagine why I can appreciate the wonderful recipes in the topic "Cooking Mama".
One day I came in very hungry from a hard day working on the ball field. I asked who was cooking and was told my older sister. After sitting down to eat I did the only thing I could do. I started carving my initials into the burger with my hammer and chisel when it jumped off of my plate and plunged to the floor before bouncing to the far wall. By instinct I jumped up but was tripped up by the hole in the floor that the burger had made. I went flying into the air but reached out just in time to make the best diving catch in my life as the burger ricocheted off the other two walls. It was a diving one hand catch better than any I ever made on the ball field.
So now you see in full why this wonderful recipe topic is so important to me now years later. I am posting the address to make it easy for you to enjoy.
Here is the site address so like I said, if you ever plan on eating food you need to visit this site:
To be posted later
WIDGETIZE