I don’t know what went wrong.  I put marshmallows and butter in the microwave, hit start, stirred frequently and ended up with an icky, sticky mess.  The marshmallows didn’t seem to melt, so I kept nuking the mixture.  By the time the marshmallows all melted, the concoction was thick as tar.  Undaunted, I added psuedo Rice Krispies to the almost flaming goop.  They weren’t mixing in all that well, so I tried pressing the the krispies in.  When that failed, I poured some krispies on wax paper and dumped the glop onto it and tried pressing the glop into the krispies – like when you knead cookie dough into flour before you roll it.  By the time I was done, there are krispies scattered all over the counter and crunching under my feet on the floor.  The results weren’t pretty — my “masterpiece” looks downright shaggy.

Ever the optimist, I thought that perhaps if they had a chance to cool, I could cut them into squares, shake off the excess krispies and they’d be interesting in a good way.   I even thought of drizzling melted chocolate on them in an artsy way to cover up the shaggyness.  That was until I tried a hunk.  It took three hunks before I accepted fate:  they didn’t make the grade.  Not to worry though.  They won’t go to waste.  I’m sending them to work with my partner.  She’ll leave them in the lounge and they’ll be gone by noon.

It was the same plain yellow mustard that every burger joint in America uses on their burgers.  The same mustard I’d had to dig through in a busy Whataburger, mortified at being the center of attention, in search of the retainer I’d tossed out with my garbage.  I’d just gotten it and wasn’t used to wearing it, wasn’t used to having to keep track of it.  And I’d taken it out because food would get under it and – well, that’s just gross, and wrapped it in a napkin because it’s also gross to have a retainer sitting on the table.  (I’d already lost its little container.)  I was ready to ditch it but my parents and I had a conversation about how much retainers cost and how many weeks it would take me to pay for it with my allowance.  By my calculations, I could have been wearing dentures by the time I got the retainer paid off, so I opted pick through the garbage.

I found my retainer, but after that experience, I switched to hiding it in my glass of tea (which to my adult brain also sounds really gross).  This didn’t work so well either because I never got good at keeping track of it.  This meant that I had to dig through the garbage to look through empty cups, or at higher class establishments, ask the wait staff to look through the empty glasses for my retainer.

By the time I got to college, I’d been wearing my retainer for years and was at least used to keeping track of it.  Still, I managed to toss it out on occasion.  Usually, I just had to got back to the dish washing area, and there it would be, sitting in a glass waiting for me.  I wasn’t so lucky the last time I tossed.  The dishwasher was down so we were using disposable dishes.  I’d dumped it into the trash with the rest of my tray.  By the time I noticed that it was missing, the cafeteria staff had already tossed out the trash so I had to dig through the great big commercial dumpster to find it.  To say that it was disgusting is an understatement.  I don’t know if it was the humiliation of having to ask my roommate and dorm mates to help me or the sickening smell of milk that was already beginning to sour, but I had a change of consciousness digging through that dumpster.  I never wanted to do that again.  I reasoned that my ability to keep track of my retainer if I wore it out was not likely to get better, so if I didn’t want to lose it, I should stop wearing it out of my dorm room.  I’d pop it in when I went to bed, slide it out in the morning before I went down for breakfast, and leave it in a little box all day.  I never lost it again.

Who says you can’t learn from digging through the garbage?

Cats have some sort of genetic encoding that recognizes the sound of a can opener and connects that sound to tuna.  And cats are such optimists when it comes to the can opener sound.  They will crawl out hiding or suddenly show up on the front porch, yowling to be let in when they even sense that the can opener is in use.  They do this even when their humans are strict vegetarians.  They may eat a few bites, but ultimately, they will look at you like have tortured them and slink off to pout.

Open a can of tuna and refuse to share.

If you don’t even offer the cat some of the tuna juice, your cat will make you pay.  I’m just saying.

Give you cat salmon or shrimp, after you’ve blackened it.

Cats usually like shrimp and salmon.  They don’t care for hot pepper or garlic and the combination really turns them off.  They expect that when you offer them food, that you will take their tastes into consideration.  When you don’t, they get insulted.  They are likely to sniff the tainted fish or shrimp, push it around with their paw and look at you pitifully, as if to say, “How could you do this to me?”

Offer your cat sauerkraut.

Even if your cat begs for it, do not under any circumstances, give your cat sauerkraut.  Not even if your cat rubs against your leg, tries to hypnotize you, or crawls up your pants to get to closer to your fork. The instant your cat gets a close sniff of the sauerkraut, they will react and it won’t be pretty.  The evil looks spurred by refried beans or hot sauce are nothing like the spiteful glare of a cat who’s just been offered sauerkraut.  It will make you want to worry about going to sleep at night.

The vandalism was annoying, but it was his consumption habits that got him into trouble.  As I said, he’d eat anything and he completely ignored all prohibitions about jumping on the cabinet or table.  In his world, any unguarded food was open game.  Most cats would go after chicken or meat if they thought they could get away with it but Sammy would go after loaves of bread, packages of rolls, cheese, whatever.  And he wouldn’t just eat one piece of anything, he’d take bites out of the middle, sometimes sampling each individual piece.  We had to put the bread in the refrigerator and guard any food we planned to serve keep him out of it.

This sort of vigilance is hard to maintain, and every so often, he’d score some prime human food.  Most notable, he destroyed a freshly baked pecan pie.  Mom had baked it for a church potluck and had set it on the table to cool while she got dressed.  Sammy found it before she got around to putting it up.  He ate the whole pecans out of the middle, leaving noticeable indentations where the pecans used to be.

Our family has always opposed animal cruelty so discipline was usually pretty lax — startling yells, squirts from a spray bottle, that sort of thing.  But when Sammy snacked on the pecan pie, Mom declared war.  We brought in the hot shot (aka cattle prod) from the barn and the next time she caught him on the table, she zapped him. You should have seen him fly!  And that did the trick.  He’d still jump on the table or the cabinet, but all you had to do was make buzzing noises that sounded like the hot shot and he’d scram.

In retrospect, I don’t think I’d advocate this as a disciplinary method for cats.  We didn’t think about this at the time.  I’d worry that the voltage might cause a heart attack.

Green Eggs and Ham

The Magic of Dr. Seuss

When I was a child, my parents had to bribe me with bedtime stories to get me to go to bed.  I had a small library of books but my favorite book was Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.  According to family lore, I requested this book every night.  I imagine that my parents grew to loathe Sam-I-Am.

Eggs

The morning after the night before…. My father was usually in charge of breakfast and he loved to make eggs.  He liked to fry them.  He liked to poach them.  And most of all, he liked to scramble them.  Given my attachment to the book, Green Eggs and Ham, it would be reasonable to assume that I liked eggs and ham.  I did not.  I did not like them, not in the house, not with a mouse, not in a box, not with a fox. I simply despised them.

This was terribly inconvenient because my parents had a rule that I was not allowed to leave the table until I finished my meal.  Our breakfast table, on egg days, was a battlefield.  I tried everything I could think of to avoid ingesting them.  I pouted.  I cried.  I stared down the eggs for hours.  I wished we had an indoor dog who would happily eat my eggs.  Once I even tried sneaking them into the trash can but got caught before the garbage went out.  The scene that ensued was not nice.  The end result is that nothing worked and I usually had to drown my eggs in ketchup.

Warped Humor

Inspiration.  I don’t know about your dad, but when my dad got inspired in the kitchen, the results were often somewhere between questionable and horrifying.  And at some point, Dad got inspired.  We had company visiting from out-of-town.  We also had ham.  You can probably see where this is going, but I’ll fill in the dots anyway.  Somehow, Dad thought it would be funny to make green eggs and ham for me for breakfast.  The other adults – the enemies – thought it was a riot.  I was mortified.  Eggs in general were bad enough, but green eggs, with a side of ham.  Well it was just too much.  And to add insult to injury, he’d poached them so it didn’t even work to cover them in ketchup.  I had to look at the ghastly green things I was eating.

Outcome

I imagine that Dad thought that this would  convince me that like Sam-I-Am’s ill-fated target, I would fall in love with green eggs and ham.  Or perhaps he just wanted to sever my attachment to the book.  Neither worked.  I simply became more resolute in my hatred of eggs and to this day, I still love to recite Green Eggs and Ham.

If you’re like me, no matter how loud your adventurous voice is, your practical voice is always louder and has more to say.  So you’re left either throwing caution to the wind and hoping for the best or never trying something new.  That is unless you find a way to experiment without the usual consequences……

My mom was a master at this.  She’d find a recipe in a magazine or cookbook that looked exciting but iffy and just go for it.  The key was she never made it for us or for a dinner party.  She’d wait until the next potluck and sneak it in.  The Methodist church we belonged to had lots of potlucks, so she had lots of opportunities to test new recipes.

The obvious question you might have is, “Didn’t she worry about what people would think if the recipe turned out bad?”  I asked her that myself.  She smiled at me and told me that she didn’t really worry about it.  She never wrote her name on the dish, so if it didn’t turn out, no one had to know.  She only fessed up to bringing the mystery dish if people raved about it.  Either way, we were spared from ghastly left overs.

If you’re not Methodist, fear not, there are lots of other ways to have other people try out risky recipes.  If your office has a break-room or lounge, you can leave the dish in the middle of the table marked as “Open game” or “Please eat me” and it will probably disappear, especially if you are a teacher, social worker or nurse.

Skipping dessert at the table is the key to my grandfather’s Carb Busting diet.  My grandfather never ate dessert at the table.  This is no small feat when the dessert in question is pecan pie.  He loved pecan pie and I don’t think I can remember a holiday gathering that didn’t include at least one.

Someone would slice the pie and ask who wanted a slice.  My grandfather would remind us that he couldn’t eat it and pass the slices along.  Then, while everyone else was wallowing in the misery of overindulgence, my grandfather would sneak into the kitchen and eat pie over the kitchen sink. This happened every holiday and not once did my grandfather have issues with his blood sugar shooting through the roof.  The obvious conclusion is that there are no carbs in pecan pie as long as you eat it over the sink.  I imagine the same is true for cheesecake.

In retrospect, I realize that my plunge into addiction to dehydrating started as a child.  I remember seeing a package of sundried tomatoes in the store.  I wanted to try them but my mother refused to buy them, no doubt because they cost a fortune.  That only made me want them more.  She also refused to buy chocolate covered ants, but somehow, being blocked from eating ants didn’t seem as frustrating.

I was intrigued by the idea of drying tomatoes in the sun.  We lived in the Southern most part of Texas and it got hot in the summers.  We also had a had a tin roofed barn and I figured that if it was hot just walking around, the tin roof got even hotter – hot enough to make my own sundried tomatoes.

I made a “sundrying” tray by nailing chicken wire to a wooden frame.  I cut some tomatoes in half and put them on the tray.  I threw a few lemon, orange and grapefruit slices on the tray for good measure and put the tray up on the roof of the barn and waited.

The experiment didn’t work so well.  Nothing really dried.  I hadn’t calculated the effect of humidity on my efforts and summers in South Texas are not just hot, they are humid.  Second, the fruit attracted bugs.  Even the thought of insects crawling on my fruit made them unappealing.  Still, these early efforts must have simmered in my system, waiting for an effort to bloom into a full blown obsession.

And then Marie left her husband. She was in trying to rebuild her life without him. She’d moved, planted a garden and gotten a dog. She’d also bought a food dehydrator. She’s actually the one who gave me the first glimpse of dehydrating in action. She’d invited my partner and me over to see her new bachelorette pad. During kitchen segment of the tour or her house, she showed us package after package of fruits and vegetables she’d dehydrated. We thought she’d just gotten a little carried away with a new hobby, like people do when they take up knitting or photography. That was until we got to the living room.

Instead of the usual chips, dip and salsa appetizer plate, she had a platter full of dehydrated fruit and another of dehydrated vegetables. I didn’t quite know what to say, so I asked her about dehydrating. Her eyes gleamed like my neighbors’ had when they pulled out the rolls of tomato paste. She all but dragged me into the kitchen to see her dehydrator in action, and the stock pile of what she was going to dehydrate next. The fact that she already had enough dehydrated produce to feed a small army didn’t seem to faze her. In that moment, I knew she’d crossed the line from recreational dehydrating to dehydration addiction.

Ten years passed before I got a dehydrator of my own. We had a garden. The cherry and grape tomatoes were all ripening at once and I couldn’t bear to see them rot. And someone told me how to make flax seed crackers in a dehydrator. That sealed it. I found a dehydrator on Amazon.com that was cheap and got good reviews. Within a week, I was dehydrating tomatoes and making flax seed crackers. Then, I put it to use on our surplus of zucchini, peppers, kale, raspberries, blueberries, and peaches. I played with marinades and seasonings. Soon, just about anything in the kitchen was open game: snow peas, bananas, garlic, onions, eggplant. Within a month, I was dehydrating 24/7, just like Marie! My father started joking that one day Jen would disappear and he’d find me, eyes gleaming, hovered over the dehydrator, looking at a tiny, shriveled version of Jen. This is when I knew…. I’d gotten hooked.