Dinner Time

The kitchen pantry was quite orderly because my father loved things in their place. He wasn't strict or military about the obsession with neatness it was more an unresolved issue from his childhood. He didn't work after a major heart attack in 1965 so mom had to go off and earn the bread. Dad became quite a good baker and I can remember the delicious sweet, lightly flavoured orange buns he would make with an orange confectioners sugar glaze icing. Actually I can't compare that to his chocolate eclairs which to this day I've never had anything similar. He loved cooking. Anyway he's the one who was the 'housewife' in the family home and cooked the meals for mom, himself, my three sisters and me. The family room table was oval shaped and was part of the kitchen only separated by a kitchen counter. Through the kitchen was a more formal dining room that was usually the place we did our homework and had special Sunday meals or Thanksgiving dinners. The door to the basement was in the family room and often we would have to put the four cats down there as dad - while adhoring the kitties - didn't like them begging for food. So, the cats paws would often be seen clawing under the basement door during dinner. They must have been so hungry for the delicious food as they meandered around the house smelling Dad's cooking all day.

Mom enjoyed her cooking too. She would destroy the pantry and take nearly every spice,  boxes, and a variety of ingredients off the shelves or from the fridge and put them on the kitchen counter. She'd take out as many pans and mixing bowls imaginable despite not needing them all and the sight of this disaster was like seeing some tragic episode of Lucille Ball in the black and white television show "I Love Lucy". Dad would come downstairs from a nap to find mom pretending to be Julia Childs. She would swing the spatula in the air and do a little dance spinning around on one foot while she skipped to the refrigerator and gleefully opened it up to find a new ingredient to add to the evolving recipe. I'm sure Dad's poor heart skipped a few beats when he saw mom prancing about the kitchen with her fake Julia Child accent. Little wafts of flour smoke she would throw up into the air mingled with the smoke from a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. He didn't get angry. It was more of a 'gasp' of disbelief.  "Oh Barbara! What are you doing?" in his soft spoken North Carolina accent. She more than likely didn't reply and continued in this baking fantasy land. He'd wander back into the living room and take solace in his Lazy Boy chair until mom called us all for dinner.

My sisters and I would either be in the back yard or down in the basement watching television or using our little toy printing press to create a local newspaper that we went around and sold to the  neighbours for ten cents. If it wasn't that we'd be making 'perfume' out of marigolds and mint leaves mixed with garden hose water that always smelled of summer. The perfume didn't sell very well I might add.

"Children!" "Children!" "Dinner's ready". If mom was calling us to dinner we knew we were in for a surprise. It meant dad hadn't done the cooking that night. Like I said mom enjoyed her cooking too. But, we didn't! We would sit there in amusement and we would eat whatever it was. She would tell us how she developed a recipe and how it was inspired from the 1950s Betty Crocker Cookbook that I loved. I was usually so perplexed how mom could make delicious snickerdoodles or crunchy old-fashioned chocolate fudge or Toll House Cookies with perfection and then go so terribly wrong with a main meal. Mom's cooking notoriously became known as 'guess the mess'. And instead of quivering at the fear of what it was we were consuming. We just gobbled it up knowing that mom really was having fun in the kitchen and being the cool mom she was.