Mother’s Day 2014 – Advice Mom Gave Me

Rebecca and her dear mom, on the day.

Rebecca and her dear mom, June 1994.

I recently flipped through some old journals and I found a list I had made of my mother’s advice through the years.   She was a good mom, friend, and confidante and had given me lots of good advice.

Some I took, some I saved for later, and some I just flat-out ignored and was very sorry for it. Oy, those terrible and stupid mistakes.  I should have listened to you, Mom!

Photo:  John Penovich

Photo: John Penovich

Here, for posterity, and to remind myself, I share with you (in no particular order):

Norma’s Rules for a Happy Life

  • Don’t lie to the IRS, the police, or your mother.
  • Don’t marry someone if you think you will change him.  The things that bug you NOW are going to bug you MUCH more later.
  • Don’t say anything that you would be embarrassed or ashamed to hear repeated.
  • Treat the boys you like like the boys you don’t like, and you will have the boys you like.
  • Sex is not love.
I love tulips more than roses for Valentine's Day. Photo credit: Rebecca Penovich


Photo: Rebecca Penovich

  • Treat your employees with respect, but let them know who’s boss.
  • Clean as you go. (Ha. She NEVER did this herself.)
  • When in doubt, throw it out. (Can apply to milk, food, boyfriends, miscellaneous mail.)
  • Use good quality ingredients in your cooking and don’t substitute.
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Photo: Rebecca Penovich

  • Buy life insurance.
  • You will always love your family even if you don’t always like them.
  • True friends reveal themselves in times of hardship.
  • Don’t marry someone who doesn’t make you laugh.
  • Clean your room, you never know what you might find.
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Photo: Rebecca Penovich

  • Lay your outfit out the night before.
  • You will never know until you try.
  • Don’t spend money you don’t have.
  • Leave your house (and desk and drawers) organized in case something happens to you but then you recover. (Meaning, so you won’t die of shame.)
Tiger lilies abound in the summer

Photo: Rebecca Penovich

 

  • Treat everyone as you wish to be treated.
  • Be welcoming if you want to be welcomed.
  • Laugh often, but not at other’s expense.
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Photo: Rebecca Penovich

 

  • Don’t overfill your washer.
  • Write thank you notes.
  • Call your mother!

Happy Mother’s Day to all you hard-working, advice-giving moms out there and if you are able to, CALL YOUR MOTHER!

Cheers!

R.

Peonies from the garden.

Peonies from the garden.

On Moms, Vintage Cookbooks, and Heirlooms

Some of our most-cherished heirlooms, right up there among old silver and art, are the vintage kitchen hand-me-downs like these old cookbooks from our mothers and grandmothers.

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Photo by Allison Beuker.

We love their splattered pages, the notes in the margins, and particularly the inscriptions in that beautiful old handwriting.

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Photo by Allison Beuker.

This is John’s mother’s signature on her copy of  “How To Cook His Goose (and Other Wild Games)” published in 1973.  This always brings a smile to my face, not only because of that cheeky title, but because I can imagine Eleanor actually cooking a recipe from it for the wild goose or duck that John’s dad would hunt on the Eastern Shore (of Maryland.)

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Photo by Allison Beuker.

This first edition of the “I Hate To Cook Book” from 1960 was given to Allison’s mom by her mom in 1963  when Pat (‘Patty’ in the affectionate inscription) was starting out as a young wife.  There’s even a note from the same year tucked inside advising the newlywed, “I can recommend heartily the Skid Road Stroganoff, Saturday Chicken, Aunt Bebe’s Bean Bowl, and Sub Gum Yuk.”

The inscription is endearing, “For Patty, who is already an excellent cook” because while the book title would suggest her interests and abilities lay elsewhere, Allison’s mom is indeed to this day an excellent and avid cook.  There are some oddly good recipes in there, and the whole edition is a quirky and fun read.  While researching this post, I discovered that the publishers reissued this book in 2010 for a new generation of I Hate To Cook cooks.  We look forward to highlighting some of the gems and downright hilarious recipe headnotes in future posts.

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Photo by Allison Beuker.

I’ve saved this old envelope with my mom’s handwritten recipe for Raw Apple Cake.  This must have been a very popular recipe (and a traditional one too) considering the number of Google hits one gets for it.  I have to say I haven’t made it yet because Mom’s recipe doesn’t say whether to peel the apples or not and I don’t have a memory of the cake.  I’ve transcribed the recipe for you at the end of the post.  If you try it, let us know in the Comments section how it compares to your Nana’s.  And if you peeled the apples or not.

I also found a handwritten copy of my grandmother’s recipe for Date Pudding which I assume was a family favorite back in the 1930s or 40s.  Dates are back in fashion now and I will give this recipe a try in the fall; I suspect it’s more cake-like or bread pudding-like and was probably served with a “hard sauce” although she was a teetotaler.  Grandmother Cullen was a Home Economics teacher in her small town in the Midwest and that is her journal in the background (in the photo above) with notes and instructions for homekeeping and meal planning.  I love that you can see my mother’s name, Norma, in the upper right.

 

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Sad clown lives in attic.
Photo by Allison Beuker.

Some heirlooms are less than fabulous in today’s taste.

But we will never, ever give this sad clown up, even if it has to live in the attic, because of this heartfelt inscription to my husband on the back.

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“Made with so much love for John in the Autumn of 1962 before he was born by his Mother.”

Happy Mother’s Day to Eleanor, Norma, Pat, Hazel, and Nellie (both in heaven and on Earth.)  And Happy Mother’s Day to you moms out there.

Hugs,

Rebecca and Allison

 

RAW APPLE CAKE (as written by Norma Lee Horton)

Rebecca’s notes in brackets.  [Note that I also changed her original abbreviation “t” to “tsp” so that we are not confused between the modern abbreviation for tablespoon (T) and teaspoon (tsp)]

Cream [together]:

2 cups sugar

1/2 cup oil

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

Add and mix well:

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp. salt

2 tsp. soda [she means baking soda]

2 tsp. cinnamon

Stir [in] 4 cups finely diced apple [peeled or not, Mom?]

1 cup chopped nuts [she would have used walnuts or possibly pecans if she had them]

Bake 45 min at 350.

9 x 13 loaf pan  [we wouldn’t call this a loaf pan anymore]

 

Kiddie Crack

Free slurpee day on 7.11

Free slurpee day on 7.11

I will never forget the time I got the dirtiest look from a mom at preschool when I gave Joe his snack and it was a baggie of the new-on-the-market multi-colored Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers. I guess it was the lurid prospect of purple and red food dyes near her child and in my child’s stomach that caused her alarm.

Goldfish Cracers Colors via darthbitch.tumblr.com 1

It’s been awhile since I’ve struggled with a toddler over food in the grocery store.  Joe is 10 now and I don’t take him to the store with me unless I have to!

But I painfully remember cursing those evil geniuses in food marketing behind the obvious placement ploys in the cereal and snack aisles.  STOP!  MOMMY! THERE ARE TOYS INSIDE!

Fruit Loops and Shrek candy placed right at child-in-cart eye level. Those end caps of potato chips – brightly colored, exploding with exciting graphics.  And the dreaded chocolate-infused, Skittles, Lifesavers, and M&M-fest that is the check-out lane.

(Of course you could queue up in the “No tabloids or candy line”  if your supermarket has one which undoubtedly ALWAYS has the little old lady who can’t find her coupons or checkbook in front of the mom with 3 teenagers with an overflowing cart including  3 12-packs of soda, 2 cases of bottled water and enough Tide to launder a baseball team.)

Remember him?

Remember him?

When Joe was riding in my cart, I sped by the cereal aisle like a Mom at Nascar.  It was just too much.  Joe would be pointedly shouting out that he “LOVES Fruities, Mommy” as we passed the Fruit Loops at exactly kid-eye level.  And there was just no time to try to comparison shop, looking for the box with the “1/3 less sugar than regular Fruit Loops” or  to discern if  Cocoa Puffs were really made with whole grain as they claimed and if so, so what?

Meanwhile your toddler is beside himself with the choices and the prospect of something yummy that he’s never had before and the harried mom is trying to do the math to see if the sugar content calculated by the actual serving size is really below 9 percent of the total….sheesh!

Maybe all moms should take a class on reading nutrition labels at birthing class.

Nutrition label

Help me! I have to do math in my head to figure this out and I have a toddler AND a new baby. I need food and sleep. Not nutrition labels.

I also remember a battle between my husband and I over Trader Joe veggie fries, otherwise known in our household as “kiddie crack.” I thought this was acceptable food, after all they do have vegetable matter in them and lots of air.  However, my husband considered them junk food, and given my son’s unnatural appetite for stuffing his face with these until he explodes, I think my husband was right.

But hey, give a mom a break. Who is in charge of the feeding day after day, mornings, noon, night, snacks? The mom!  (Usually.)

Ten years after Joe was born there are now way more natural, organic, fresh, local, gluten-free, sugar-free, wheat-free, nut-free, corn syrup-free choices out there (not that I make use of them all the time, or any of the time.)

Making good food choices and clashing swords over the junk food battlefield with my budding middle-schooler still happens and I do try to make sure Joe gets in his four food groups (wait, aren’t there 5 now?) over the course of the day.

And what, veggie crack fries are not in one of those food groups?  No worries.  Joe doesn’t break my back for those anymore now that he’s moved on to the barbecue potato chips that the babysitter turned him on to.

Joe with cherries from our neighbors tree.

Joe with cherries from our neighbor’s tree.