Dinner Is Served

Back around Thanksgiving, I had a nice piece of ham laying around and threw it in the crock pot with some lima beans, water, and seasonings. 8 hours later, I had a simple, hearty meal on a very frigid day.

Growing up, my Mom’s lima beans and ham was one of the meals that I didn’t like – at all. But somehow, by the time I had reached adulthood, I had acquired a taste for it. Comfort food. Easy to make – even someone lacking the most elementary culinary chops like me couldn’t screw that up.

However, just like me, none of my kids cared for it – again, at all – while they were growing up. So it was more than a little surprising that all three of them voluntarily partook of this stuff during the latest Thanksgiving break.

Maybe my kids were just being polite to me, but I began to ponder if maybe there is some interplay at work here between nostalgia and taste buds. Or maybe this is another aspect of the circle of life? Either that or some weird aspect of the Nedimyer DNA that doesn’t manifest itself until the age of 21 or so.

This episode with the lima beans and ham triggered some additional remembrances about dinners growing up in Altoona. When it came to dinner planning and food preparation, my Mom was pretty basic. Of course the budget didn’t really enable extravagance in this area, but Dad’s tastes really drove the dinner menu. There wasn’t a lot of experimentation or variation.

For example, we only had Kentucky Fried Chicken once growing up. On that single occurrence, one of the wings in the bucket was undercooked and Cody N thereafter decreed that KFC and the Colonel were permanently banished from the Nedimyer Family menu. I don’t recall us ever having Chinese or Mexican cuisine. Not even tacos. If Dad didn’t care for it, we weren’t having it.

Mom did make this chili-con-carne concoction, but that was a bit different and I am not sure it could be classified as Mexican. It was rather bland, a bit heavy on Red Kidney Beans, and served on top of, get this, mashed potatoes. Now, I am going to plead ignorance on the origin of that. I realize that at Cincinnati's famous Skyline Chili, they do the chili-over-pasta-with-shredded-cheese-deal. Maybe this was a Central PA forerunner to that?

Now if a meal like lima beans and ham or chili was on the menu for the day, you really just dealt with it. There certainly weren’t going to be special alternatives created just for you for that day. You could maybe work in a bowl of cereal after the meal, but you were strongly encouraged to finish what was on your plate that evening. This was just one plank of what I call the “Tough Shit” philosophy of parenting that Mom and Dad practiced – and, believe me, I thank my lucky stars everyday for that!

Lest I give the impression that I didn’t care for my Mom’s cooking, there were more than a few of her meals that were banging:

• Spaghetti and meatballs. Mom’s own sauce recipe and homemade meatballs with block pepperoni.
• Homemade pork and beans, slow-cooked all day.
• Beef stroganoff served over noodles.
• Roast beef and mashed potatoes (a Sunday staple).

(I guess this is as good a point as any in this post to shamelessly grovel for copies of these and any other Mom recipes. So, to any of my siblings who happen to be in possession of these treasures, could you hook a brother up? Any format will work – scanned, photocopied, or transcribed. Would be greatly appreciated!)

We wouldn’t eat fast food very often. When we did, it would typically be on Saturday and in the form of either McDonald’s or some Palmino’s Pizza. The predominant Saturday meal was homemade hamburgers and pickles with potato chips. Dad would get two burgers – everybody else would get one. This meal wouldn’t be served until after 5:00 PM as Dad would always block out 3:30-to-5:00 on Saturday afternoons for the Professional Bowlers Tour event, televised on ABC with Chris Schenkel and Nelson Burton, Jr.

Deserts were pretty standard – with the exception of potato candy, which was a bit out of the mainstream. Food wasn’t thrown out in our house. Potato candy was the end result of the process to stretch as much out of the food budget as possible. Leftover mashed potatoes would be harvested, rolled out into a flat thin layer and then augmented with a sprinkling of confectionery sugar and a thin layer of peanut butter. The potatoes would then be rolled into a jelly roll and cut into thin pieces. This was a very rich desert. I think the rule-of-thumb was to plan for about 12 ounces of liquid per piece of potato candy consumed.

Before my mom took a job at Modern Communications, we would typically eat dinner on weekdays around 5:00 PM. This would allow my Dad time to, after work, get cleaned up, and then retire to the living room where he would have a couple of beers, enjoy a cigar, and read the Altoona Mirror.