The Psychology of Soup

I made soup this last week. While this isn't earth-shattering news, it also doesn't mean that I cranked open a can of Campbell's either. See, I inherited a Soup Gene from my maternal grandmother and that means I don't just make soup, I understand soup, like in a Freudian way.

I think it was back when I was in college and had finally moved into a place with a stove that I called my mother for her Barley Soup recipe. Growing up, Barley Soup and Latkes were two of the only things I'd eat since I appear to have been born with a distinctly Jewish palate. She informed me the first ingredient was water.

"Water? To make soup?" This sounded fishy to me. I'm a little stupid in a kitchen but I would say the first ingredient should have been anything but water.

Then she rattled off a quick list of everything else that needed to be tossed in the pot, with a perfunctory slice here and there: onions, carrots, potatoes, beef short ribs. The mystery of the bay leaf.

"Oh, and barley," she said. "You should probably put in barley. Though I once made barley soup without barley and Dad didn't even notice."

So that's how I make Barley Soup; I just start dumping ingredients into a pot. If I have too many ingredients, and I always do, I go to a second pot. Etcetera. This is how I end up being the go-to-soup-gal for all my sick friends, how I freeze gigantic Tupperware containers full of soup and how I provided my stepfather with soup that he ate sparingly, in impossibly tiny amounts, during his last eight months in Arizona.

So it's really no surprise that the week after he passed away I suddenly found myself with this urge to make soup. Maybe the soup will make me feel better, since I can't save him. Maybe it'll answer the question of where exactly my elderly are for whom I used to make soup? If I make soup and bring it over there, will he just magically appear, regaling me with tales about how he takes my soup and then makes rice to thicken it and extend its usefulness? How magic is this soup anyway?

I would say, "Bob, the soup will go bad, you're making it last too long. It won't be good in a week."

But he looks at me like only someone who grew up during the Depression can, only someone who saves paper and plastic bags, only someone who still pronounces Cincinnati "Cincinnata," and says, "You should try it, Linda! One small box of Uncle Ben's - here I'll show you - and I won't need any more food for weeks!"

Here's what I used to know: I could take one of my gigantic soup pots, put water in it and a bunch of other things and an hour or two later I would have food. From water. From nothing. Food that could keep people alive.

Here's what I know now: I can't. 

Are you in charge of any signature family recipes? Has your family been touched by frugality? Missing anyone?

A Pilgrim's Potluck

Being one of seven sisters means a lot of things. It means that I grew up in a crowded house and found it downright eerie to be alone. It meant never eating out, wearing hand-me-downs; it meant having relatives look at me and always needing to guess "which sister" I was and always get my name wrong. For ease they reverted to numbering us. I am still known as number six.

It also means this: I've never once made a Thanksgiving meal. I'm not happy about this because I kind of like making a big, nightmarish, complicated meal (see Passover blog entries from last spring), but I don't get to. See, I'm not the sister in charge of Thanksgiving. I'm the sister in charge of Hanukkah, so to speak, and since Hanukkah bounces around the calendar, one year at the end of December and the next at the beginning - like this year - I can't do both.

So for Thanksgiving we drive off from our house in whatever direction the party's at - this time it was at sister number seven's new house. I'm assigned a dish to bring, always something suspiciously simple because there seems to be an impression in our family that I can't cook. One small mistake - a charred, inedible brisket - in all these years and my reputation was ruined forever. So this year I was assigned a very traditional Thanksgiving dish, one everyone fantasizes whenever they think about Thanksgiving, right after they think about turkey, stuffing and pecan pie. I was assigned the veggie tray. 

We have a veggie tray at our party for a couple reasons. First of all, in a family with seven sisters and many grown nieces and nephews, everyone's always dieting so vegetables are welcome. Second of all, there are so many people coming (just add up for a moment seven sisters, husbands, seventeen nieces and nephews,  significant others, and five great-nieces) that we run out of food assignments. Hence, the veggie tray. Maybe it's not just my incompetence or my reputation as a bad cook; maybe it's that: there's nothing left to assign. I take solace in the idea that the pilgrims probably had a lot of vegetables at their first Thanksgiving.

Luckily I didn't screw it up. Maybe I can parlay this success into something more significant next year, like soda pop.

Do you cook Thanksgiving or go somewhere? In your family are you assigned food to bring? Ever get assigned something that didn't quite fit the holiday or something really easy?

Human Garbage Can

Bar Mitzvahzilla is leaving for his eighth grade trip on Monday - a week in Washington, D.C. with his classmates. Gosh, a week without a teenager in the household. No talking back intended to wound our very souls. No slammed doors. No hovering, sullen teen, now taller than me, arguing with me in a voice that sounds like Barry White. What will husband and I do?

Um, celebrate?

So, to celebrate, we let Bar Mitzvahzilla pick a restaurant for dinner tonight. He picks Mexican food. We sit down at the table, the busser brings a basket of chips and, almost before anyone else can get one, Bar Mitzvahzilla has eaten all of them. Same with the second basket.

Because he's spent years coveting anything I eat and I've the fajita salad at this place, Bar Mitzvahzilla next orders this salad, though I've already given him a dire warning that he's probably ruined his appetite with so many chips. He scoffs at me. (Note: I also will not miss scoffing for one week.) Of course, he's right. There is actually no such thing as "ruining his appetite." He just continually stuffs food down his mullet before his brain has a chance to register that his stomach is full, then suddenly a distress signal is sent up from the stomach to the brain - while his mouth is still full - and he'll just stop chewing. He's done. That's it.

So he makes his way through the salad. Then he starts trolling for excess food around the table. Is Husband going to finish his burrito? Am I going to finish my taco? My Pico de Gallo? My garnish? Is there any refuse on the table he can perhaps lick up? It's like sitting at a table with a vulture. We hover protectively over our plates so he can't swoop in and grab our food.

While Husband and I are sitting across from Bar Mitzvahzilla tonight we both realize with rising horror that we're about to set our son loose on his unsuspecting classmates and they'll all soon be witnessing his table manners. The clutching of the fork like it's a spade. The overloading of the fork with too much food. The mouth opened wide like a bird, his braces glinting in there. The general multi-napkin mess that is his face after all this has transpired.

We begin some belated instruction: Smaller bites! Cut your food! Don't eat like you're starving! Slow down! Then we give up, exasperated. It's Washington, D.C.'s problem for one week, not ours.

Any ravenous children over at your place? How is the table manner-training going? Have you ever sent a kid off on one of these really big "field trips?"

The Inedible: Five Jewish Foods To Avoid

I'm not a wimpy eater. I grew up with all the traditional foods; after all, my parents were Eastern European. Everything on our kitchen table was unidentifiable. What was identifiable was somehow referred to only by its Yiddish name so that I could feel as foreign as possible in the neighborhood. For example, I only knew the Yiddish names for chicken leg (polka) and chicken wing (fleagle). This is how I ventured out of our house (which was actually part of Poland) into America (outside the door): unable to communicate with the neighbors.

I wasn't that picky. I liked herring, I liked smelly fishes, I probably could've eaten an onion like an apple as a kid, that's how foreign we were. But when certain foods showed up on our table, there was no way my mother was fooling me - I knew inedible when I saw it. Mysterious foods, nefarious foods, foods that we'd stir to take a look-see and there'd be a globule of some primevil creature bobbing to the surface and then a leaf. With all of them, my mother was exceedingly evasive about the ingredients which led to one response only: my mouth clamped shut.

Here, then, to supplement my recent list of Essential Yiddish words, are five Jewish foods to avoid. Don't be lulled by exotic-sounding Yiddish names and don't think you'll offend the hosts by turning these foods down. These foods are always being turned down.

 1) Borscht - This beet soup. It's red and chunky. Do I need to say more than that? 

2) Schav - This is cold sorrel soup. It's green and comes in a glass jar. It's the evil half-twin of Borscht.

3) The Glop from the Gefilte Fish jar - Each Passover I buy several jars of Gefilte Fish which come packed in something called "jellied broth," a gloppy, gunky, clear slime that I wash off each piece of fish before serving. My mother loves this stuff. She begs me to save her all the extra glop in one jar and bring it to her after Passover. She doesn't want the fish; she wants the glop.

4) Poopik - Here's a newflash: when I was a little girl grown ups would play with me pretending they were going to eat my "poopik" - my belly button. And guess what, it means the exact same thing when, a few hours later, I'd sit down at the kitchen table and my mom would say, "Who wants the poopik?" Today - yes, forty-five years later - I asked her what animal, exactly, she had stolen this belly button from. She said, "A chicken." It's actually part of the Yiddish food psychology to drive you a little crazy thinking about whether chickens actually have belly buttons.

5) Kishke - This is fat mixed with sugar and flour and then stuffed in a casing, which I believe it means it's stuffed in an intestine. This is something I grew up with and loved but, as an adult, how does one make this exactly? How am I supposed to go to the butcher and request fat or casings? How am I supposed to tell my family that tonight we're going to eat, um, fat? How many calories, exactly, is this fat plus sugar plus flour going to have?  So onto the inedible list it goes.

What foods were on your table as a kid that you considered inedible? Did you ever try them? Are there any foods you eat now that your own kids consider inedible?

Scaled Down

I had to go to a few doctor appointments lately. Besides the time involved, the eye-crossing impossibility of fitting something in a schedule already stretched tight, there was one other problem: the weigh in.

How can I express how very much I hate to be weighed at a doctor's office? Or, let's be plain about this, how much I hate to be weighed at all?

Scales and I go way back, to when I first got my weight problem at age fifteen. That's when I first began perfecting my scale shenanigans. The first thing I did was I always adjusted the scale at home to be a few pounds under zero. I don't remember exactly why I started doing this but I do remember that there was  some complicated math involved which took into account the times that scale had been wrong before and the difference between a hard surface weigh-in or a carpet weigh-in. In other words, just like forty is the new thirty, in my house, negative three was the new zero.

Then there was the weigh-in itself. Naked from my shower, and on twinkle toes, I approached the scale with extreme caution, like maybe it was a grenade. Near-sighted, I would get close to it to inspect for the proper negative three setting. Then, all being in order, I would flutter up onto it, first one foot and then the other, looking down - nearly blind - and ready to make a quick getaway once I saw even a glimmering of an acceptable number, even if the scale was on its way to a different one. Then I fluttered off.

I didn't have a love/hate relationship with the scale, it was pure hate/hate.

Finally, my husband put an end to my agony. One time, during a garage sale, he snuck our scale outside and sold it. Now I only get weighed at doctors' offices, whether it's once every six months or twice in one week.

So how do I prepare for a doctor appointment? Do I carefully gather all my questions about my illness? Do I gather all my available medical records and x-rays?

No, I stand in my closet and I carefully examine my wardrobe to see what I can wear that is the lightest weight. I mull over whether it would look weird to wear cotton shorts in the winter? Do I own any gauze? Can I wear a negligee? I consider it quite a milestone that I'm willing to wear clothes at all. In the elevator going up to the doctor's office I surreptitiously slip off my watch and wedding rings. My poor doctor thinks I've been divorced for years.

At the scale, the same thing always happens. The heartless nurse marches me over to the thing like a prisoner. She seems surprised by the delay as I slip off my shoes. Does she actually expect me to accept a hit of a pound or two for shoes? Then, while I literally stop breathing, she starts playing with the weights, a little up, a little down, sliding here and there. Finally it stops. I look. It's okay. Still, next time I'm closing my eyes. 

What kind of games do you play with your scale? Are you the type who hops on and off ten times a day or not at all? Do you hate being weighed at a doctor's office? Do you ever try to wear lightweight clothing?

Spring Break, Spring Broken

It's kind of blurry, all the images are running together now, but I believe my kids last went to school on March 26th, a Friday. Then there was a weekend during which I cooked and cooked and then cooked some more, a Monday during which I cooked even more and then set our table, and then there were two Passover Seders. I remember a lot of matzoh. That was a long time ago already - a week. Why are the kids still off from school?

Every school on the planet started back up today after Spring Break. Except mine. My kids are off till Wednesday because their Spring Break is geared towards something different than Spring and more indistinct than Easter: it's geared towards Passover, which apparently will never end. 

After our seders there was a three-day trip to Tucson, then another weekend. Now it's Monday again. They don't return to school till Wednesday, April 7th. That's like a different month than when this thing started.

We haven't eaten bread this entire time, we've been eating matza, which, in my opinion, takes a bit of doctoring up to taste good. We've also had a couple close calls, like where Daughter had some food, let's say a crouton, on its way to her mouth, then halfway in her mouth, and I said, "Stop! It's bread!" and she pulled it out at the last second. Also, we have a loose definition of what bread is. It has to look like bread to be bread. Let's put it this way: we eat tortillas.

Today my kids announced that instead of my idea for explaining why they were the only kids off from school today at the places we went - that they were 4th and 8th grade drop outs - they decided to say that I was homeschooling them. I looked at them and two thoughts flashed through my mind: gratitude for all the wonderful teachers they've had and how very lucky Husband and I have been, and horror at the thought of me homeschooling them. Because that would be just my style, to homeschool my kids and take them shopping all day for a lesson in, um, "economics."

Here's one thing I've learned because of this Spring Break that won't end: because of spending so much quality, unstructured time with Bar Mitzvahzilla in this strange loop of time we're calling Spring Break, a harbinger of the summer to come, I've decided that what we need in the summer is a lot LESS time together. He really needs to go to summer school and football camp. It turns out that what will make Bar Mitzvahzilla unhappy is what will make Mommy happy - me minus one lurking ominous bad-tempered teenager.

Just one more day left. And then Spring Break will be broken.

Did you ever give up a food only to find it in your mouth by accident? Is spending too much time around the kids solidifying your summer camp plans? How was your Spring Break?

A Different Kind of Ish

Okay, I'm not Irish, I'll admit it. Each year when I wake up on St. Patrick's Day, I don't bounce out of bed thinking about it or about fields of four-leafed clovers. Of course, then I arrive at my exercise class and, duh, everyone is always wearing green and all of our routines for the day are Irish jigs.

The problem, of course, is that I'm a different kind of Ish - Jewish. There are several differences between being Irish and Jewish. Here's a short list of the Irish terms on the left with their Jewish equivalents on the right.

                      

Tiny Leprechauns = Shrunken Elderly relatives

Green Beer = Mogen David Wine

Green cookies = Matzah

Corned Beef and Cabbage = Corned Beef on Rye

Gaelic = Yiddish

Jaunty caps = Yarmulke

Red Hair = No Hair

Dancing a Jig = Dancing the Hora

Pot 'O Gold at the End of the Rainbow = Pot 'O Gold in the Bank

Not surprisingly, there's no Jewish equivalent for "The Luck of the Irish." 

It's just a different kind of Ish.

Got any Irish equivalents from your culture or religion? Does your life sometimes feel like it runs on a different calendar than the rest of the world? Do you do a big celebration for St. Patrick's Day or not?

What's Cooking?

After years of proving over and over again that I can't be trusted in the kitchen, of proving that I can't actually formulate a balanced meal for my family, or calculate getting that meal to the table at precisely the time the family might reasonably be hungry, an amazing thing has happened: Daughter has started cooking.

This happened slowly. The first hint was when she'd be watching TV and, instead of watching Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel, she'd turn on The Food Network. At first I thought this was because I was so pathetic in the kitchen that she just wanted to see food - even on TV. But that wasn't it, because she was always eating while watching these shows.

Then she eagerly started watching the competition shows, the cake bake-offs, the meal in a box shows, the outdoor kitchen shows.

Finally came her demand:  she wanted to cook dinner for us. Of course this involved me doing all the chopping, Husband doing all the cooking, and her supervising from on high, the recipe/menu/idea person. She wasn't actually going to get her hands dirty or anything. Anyway, would you trust a ten-year-old with a big knife?

I don't know why I never took to cooking. I definitely took to eating. I guess I was just more of the instant gratification type of eater. When I wanted it, I had it, like with a spoon and one jar of peanut butter and one jar of jelly. No simmering over a hot stove for this appetite.

So Daughter made up a menu with an appetizer, a main dish, a side dish and a dessert and then she put me to work preparing, put herself to work making a secret sauce for the fish, and put Husband to work grilling. Her secret ingredient for her secret sauce? Soy sauce. She only uses soy sauce and she only makes her sauce for fish.

You know how normally when your kids give you something to eat, especially something pretend - like when they hand you a plastic burger - you have to pretend everything is really delicious? Well, weirdly enough, when Daughter's made something, each time it's really been delicious. We were wary, we were skeptical, we were reticent, but each time we've tried her recipes it's been great. Now we're eager. We sit down at the table, which must be fully set each time, and all of us are appreciative of the ten-year-old chef in our midst who's wrestled the cooking duties from mom.

Of course, we're almost out of soy sauce and our blood pressures are sky rocketing, but still.

Are there any tasks you'll willingly hand over to your kids, or that your kids are showing an affinity for already? Do you mind being pushed aside as an incompetent nincompoop? Have you tried our "secret?" Soy sauce on fish?

Ten Things That Lead Me to Believe That I'm Jewish

Since I got the Sugar Doll Award from Big Little Wolf's Daily Plate of Crazy, I need to tell you ten things about myself that you may not know. So I thought I'd tell you ten things about me that have led me to believe, conclusively, that I just may be Jewish.

1) I'm married to a guy named Howard. Not only this, but when I was in Jewish Singles, all the guys were named Howard. I could only differentiate them by the adjectives I attached to their names - like Fat Howard, Thin Howard, Boring Howard, and Cheap Howard. Which one do you think I married? (Okay, all joking aside, I married Thin Howard.)

2) I have a Jewish wedding contract (a ketubah) that says that if we ever get divorced my husband has to give me a divorce settlement of eighteen cows. I'll have to check with my HOA, but I'm thinking we're not allowed to have livestock here.

3) I clean the house from top to bottom before a party, let everyone destroy the house at the party, and then I clean it again.

4) My eating disorder? Fat. My twelve years in Weight Watchers showed a net gain of twenty-five pounds rather than a loss.

5) My grandmothers' names? Goldie and Sosha. My grandfathers? Yaacov and Gershon.

6) My choice of my childrens' names was not based on what I or my husband liked, but by checking out the names of our dead relatives.

7) I crave smoked fish.

8) I will actually move from my house to a different house to make sure my son gets into the right high school.

9) I grew up not knowing exactly what I was eating - in English. I only knew the words in Yiddish. The base ingredient of every dish? Rendered fat. 


10) When it rains, my face disappears inside the exploding Jewfro that used to be my hair.

What is an undeniable fact that you are who you are, whether you're Catholic, Mormon or Baptist? What gives you away and is so apparent you can just forget about hiding it?

Thank you to Big Little Wolf for awarding me the Sugar Doll! Although she's way too smart for me, I try to make my my limited brain cells concentrate once a day and go visit her wonderful blog where she always makes me think and I always find a lively discussion.

The Sugar Doll is passed along to one or more terrific writers who connect, contribute, entertain, enlighten, and otherwise make our day. Each person who receives it may then choose one to ten others to whom it is given. The recipient is required to post “Ten things you don’t know about me.” I'm passing my Sugar Doll along to Chris at A Deliberate Life, whose honesty and  determination have taught me a lot since I began reading her blog, and to Kristen at Motherese, whose finely-tuned mind and fascinating conversations remind me that this motherhood journey is not for the faint-hearted.

Brace Face

Bar Mitzvahzilla got his braces back on two weeks ago. At this point in his orthodontic career, I truly can't even keep track of exactly what's been done to his mouth. I know he already wore them once because I have a school picture of him wearing them two years ago. And, of course, I remember writing a really big check to the orthodontist.

I also remember a mounted retainer and an arch expander. I remember waiting for his molars to fall out. And I remember vague threats from the dental hygenist about how if he didn't improve his brushing, his gums were soon going to cover his teeth and there'd be no teeth left to put braces on.

After that, it was all a blur.

So he got upper-only braces this time and you would think that they had amputated a limb. Moaning and wailing, he couldn't eat. He was gumming his food, moaning, wailing, bringing home his lunch box full, and he's fourteen - the age of insatiable hunger.

I tend to be a little unsympathetic about orthodontia. After all, I spent a total of five years wired up, three as a kid and two as an adult. Part of that time was to fix the crooked chiclet teeth I'd been born with and to yank down the fangs that were growing in the middle of my head. I was happy to wear the braces then, happy to know that soon I'd look like a regular human being instead of like I might end up on display in a circus.

The second time was part of treatment for jaw surgery I had at age twenty-nine. It was especially fun to wear braces right then since it coincided with my divorce. I was easily the only woman in Jewish Singles in 1989 wearing braces like a twelve-year-old.

This inability of Bar Mitzvahzilla to cheerfully withstand discomfort bothers me a little. I can't talk him out of it by relating mine and others' many acts of courage in the face of debilitating medical problems. A teenager, he's sure he knows everything in the world. Maybe in ten years? It worries me because even though I know he's nice and caring and a wonderful kid so far, there's this thing that whines inside of him, the plaintive wail, this thing that stops him from being able to measure his pain of braces against, say, the victims of the Earthquake in Haiti.

There's no real answer. I make him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a while and glare at the contents of his lunchbox that keep returning day after day.  Then, when he finally gets used to it, I unzip the lunchbox one day and notice it is empty.

Do your children have the ability to handle pain or discomfort cheerfully or does the way they handle it ever make you worry about their inner character? Any orthodontic stories? Fangs? 

The Germ Factory

I had planned my mom's visit to my house for my Chanukah party very carefully.  She'd been sick for a while, with the kind of cough that sprays you through the phone, so I thought, surely she'd understand a touch of germ paranoia now!  Especially in this season of the miserable H1N1, when everyone knows the danger of spreading germs.  Surely even my mother will be on board now with my requests not to pick at the food. 

She always makes fun of Husband and me for this exact issue.  Her version of science, pre-1940, indicates
that she only gets sick from cold not from germs.  Of course, she spent World War II living in the Polish forest without a coat, so maybe that's understandable.  But basically, if she can't see it, it doesn't exist.  Meanwhile, she's sick all the time.  My family - I blame Husband - goes with modern scientific theory: cover your mouth when sneezing, don't share germs on purpose.

My mother doesn't believe in any of this.  Loudly.  Her standard answer, perfected over the forty-nine years of my life to an ear-splitting shriek is, "You think you're so smart, Linda!  Well, I raised all seven of you and managed not to kill anyone!"

So she comes over for the Chanukah party and there are a lot of seating options.  She can sit at the long, long kitchen table, far away from the food serving area.  She can sit on one of the couches, also far, far away from the food serving area.  But no.  She sits on a bar stool, right on top of the food serving area, the better so that she can pick at the food. With her fingers.

In my larger family, the family with the seven sisters, for some reason hands are serving utencils.  There's some connection here with dieting that I haven't quite figured out yet, like if they pick, pick, pick at the food with their fingers - no plate - the calories don't count. Because if someone says, "Did you have a piece of cake?" The answer can legitimately be "No." No piece of cake was obtained.  The cake was just picked at until crumbs remained on the platter, but no legitimate slice of cake was placed on a plate and consumed, like a real human being.  So, no calories. 

In my family, platters of meat disappear this way, containers of potato salad are demolished, and, yes, cakes vanish into thin air.

So my mother sat there, sick, picking at all the food, glaring at me if I glared at her, refusing my offer of a plate or for me to make her a sandwich, seat her at the table, a choice chair perhaps - anywhere!  Then I noticed everyone at the party was picking except my little family of germophobes. 

And I thought, okay, obviously I'm the lunatic here.  What did it matter anyway?  Since we knew this was going to happen, husband and I, Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter made sure and isolated ourselves from those germs:  we ate before the party.

Bar Mitzvahzilla vs. the Burger

We went out to dinner tonight.  Bar Mitzvahzilla ordered the largest burger the restaurant had:  two half-pound hamburgers on one bun with a combination of french fries and onion rings on the side.  When it showed up, it was about eight inches tall.  Husband and I looked on in amazement.  How would Bar Mitzvahzilla fit this monstrosity in his mouth?  Who would win?  The burger or Bar Mitzvahzilla?

He made a quick job of the onion rings. Made it half way through the french fries.  He picked up the burger and tried to eat it.  Bar Mitzvahzilla is not the most coordinated fellow on the planet.  He's also fourteen, an age where his limbs all seem too big for him and everything seems slightly out of whack. 

Husband - the engineering type - was giving tips and advice from his side of the table. 

"Flip the burger over so it has a lower center of gravity and more stability," he said. 

I look at Husband.  Is he going to set up a rope and pulley system to get this thing into Bar Mitzvahzilla's mouth next?  Maybe he'd like the crayons the restaurant gave Daughter and the kid's menu to write on so he could come up with some quick algebraic calculations and devise a system of consumption?   

Finally, Bar Mitzvahzilla put the burger down.  A little worn out but still hungry, he began trolling for food on our plates.  First he ate half my quesadilla, then he mooched part of Daughter's hotdog, then he ate the contents of the bread basket in the middle of the table. 

In the box of take home food?  Two half-pound burgers.

Score:  Bar Mitzvahzilla 0 Burger 1 

A Month of Eating

 

Husband hasn't stopped eating since Halloween.  That's a month.

First it was the Halloween candy.  I had to be the neutral mediator between Husband and the kids in the issue of Who Gets All the Candy?  If the kids weren't willing to give Husband all the Kit Kats and the Peanut M&Ms, he was threatening to take away every bit of candy in the name of healthy parenting.

That candy lasted two weeks.  Then came some kind of pre-Thanksgiving Day sale at his favorite grocery store involving huge quantities of ice cream, again a problem with the kids.  Husband wanted all the ice cream but the kids rightfully believed that the ice cream should maybe involve them.  Again, I interceded.  Although I do think Husband gave in too easily possibly due to a hidden stash in our freezer in the garage. 

Then I baked all the bananas in our house into banana bread.  That was some kind of ape festival around here but there was enough to share. 

Then came Thanksgiving Day itself which, somehow, was all about the desserts.  A little turkey, a lot of desserts.

Through it all, Husband stood next to each food table, a conveyer belt nearly set up next to the food which then ascended directly into his mouth.  There was nothing he wouldn't eat.  He ate and ate and ate and then took a plate home to eat later. 

And then, since there's absolutely no justice in this world, my husband, who should weigh about four hundred pounds, but actually weighs about 155, and should have gained an extra hundred pounds this month alone, noticed his pants - size 32 - were getting a little snug, so he cut back for a couple of days and got back to normal, 152.

And now onto December. 

An Immigrant Thanksgiving

Because we were a family of immigrants, we never got Thanksgiving quite right when I was a kid in Skokie.  It's not that we didn't want to give thanks - trust me, being a family of Holocaust Survivors welcomed to the United States post-war, there was no shortage of thanks.  The problem was the food. We just didn't understand the food.

We understood turkey. We preferred chicken, but, fine.  Turkey could be dealt with.  It was a kosher animal, after all.  No problem with the turkey.  The problem with my family were always the other dishes, like the desserts, which we grouped in our minds as not quite Jewish. 

Pumpkin pie? No. Dessert to us was only coffee cake and it was never actually sliced.  It was served the exact same way it is now:  put in the center of a table of hungry, dieting women all holding forks and, voila, ten minutes later it's gone.  Pecan pie? We were firm about this.  Absolutely the only nuts in our family were humans - all the strange inbred Jews who emigrated as one block, hairnets on their heads, frowns on their faces, purses stiffly carried from room to room, no English. I spent years not knowing whom one woman was who came to every party on my mother's side.  Finally I asked.  She was one of my aunts. 

My mother's now been in the U.S. for sixty years; we should know how to do this by now.  But today, at our Thanksgiving dinner, besides all the other stuff, here's what I saw:  Turkey, Matzah Ball soup, Challah. Is this some kind of immigrant Thanksgiving?  Or maybe we're half pilgrim and half Jewish, half American and half Lithuanian, even after all this time.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Hold the Mayo

My mother and I have an ongoing argument going about medical care.  The main topic of our argument?  Mayo Clinic.

Like other seniors, my mother swears by Mayo Clinic.  If she stubs her toe, she goes to Mayo Clinic.  To her, Mayo Clinic, and the Mayo Hospital we have here in Phoenix, are like those one-stop clinics they have in drugstores now.  There's no problem too minute to go shlep out to Mayo Clinic to have an expert see it for her.  She'll pop in any time.   

Our argument always starts with some kind of medical discussion, maybe I need an evaluation of some type or one of my kids do.  Her response? 

"Go to Mayo Clinic!"

"Mom, you know Mayo Clinic isn't covered on my insurance." It's never once been covered on any insurance I've ever had.

"I don't care.  Pay for it yourself.  You have plenty of money."

Why does this make me nuts?  Is it because now I'm in two arguments?  There's the one about Mayo Clinic and then there's the new one about whether I have any money.  To not go to Mayo, I have to prove to my mom that I'm poor.

"Mayo Clinic isn't the only place to go in the world, Ma."

"It's the best!"

There's a pause during which I fume and try to figure out where she got this prejudice.

My mother's history with doctors is unremarkable.  As a young mom in Skokie she treated almost exclusively with her obstretrician, the one who delivered six out of seven of us, and who apparently failed to adequately discuss birth control options with her. Then there was the pediatrician who used to show up at our house and examine all seven of us in a row, mixing up our names. Later, when I became a sickly asthmatic, she used to drive like a bat out of hell to a town two hours north of Chicago and a doctor who had one of the only nebulizer machines in existence in 1973, so huge it took up an entire room. She'd take over the waiting room regaling the other patients with the dramatized Story Of My Asthma while I spent the day with the nebulizer.

No Mayo Clinic. But did Mayo Clinic beckon to her from Rochester; did she think of it as the clinic of last resort if, finally, the gigantic nebulizer didn't work, if, finally, I turned blue with the lack of oxygen?

Then she says, "And anyway, the food in the cafeteria at Mayo Hospital is the best food anywhere. Bob and I try to eat out there at least once a week."

"Ma, it's a hospital cafeteria."

"They have a chef."

Okay, that's it.  The conversation has descended into inanities.  Also, I'm dangerously close to finding out exactly what she ate at each meal and I'm not going to fall into that trap. 

"Well, maybe we'll try it some time."

"The Clinic?"

"No. The cafeteria."

Her turn to fume.

One Potato, Two Potato

I call my mom and I have enough time to talk - I'm not really rushed - but I kind of have to triage topics. We have to move quickly along, not hover too long on topics that get her ire up. Like the Holocaust. Or the Nazis.

But there are other, less obvious topics on which she can wax and wane, topics that are not always so obvious. Like food. My mother would like nothing better than to regale me for hours with an unending litany of all the food she and Stepfather eat each day - no detail is ever too small. If I could just remember not to ask her what she's eating, to stay clear of that trap, everything would be fine.

We're on the phone and it's 5:00, which in the time zone pulsating around my mother's house means it's really ten o'clock PM. I've called too late. She and Stepfather need to eat and rush off to bed. I realize my error.

"Oh, sorry, Ma. Do you need to go eat?"

"Eat? Bob and I don't eat."

"You don't?"

"For dinner tonight we're sharing a potato."

"One potato?"

"Between the two of us."

"You can't have two potatoes?"

"Oy! We could never eat so much."

"Well, okay, Ma, I'll talk to you tomor-"

But she's just warming to the topic.

"Do you know what we ate for breakfast?"

"No, what?"

"A boiled egg."

"One boiled egg?"

"For the both of us."

"You couldn't each have your own egg?"

"We can't eat so much. We're not young like you."

It's good to hear that I'm young, especially since I'm turning fifty in five months.

"Well, Ma, I've got to go-"

"And lunch. Do you want to know what we had for lunch?"

"Well - "

"One small salad. For both of us."

Then I realize that if I just give the right answer, it will give her recognition for being the least hungry, most meagerly eating woman on the planet. So I express amazement.

"You don't say?"

"Yes. One small salad."

"One small salad?"

"One small salad."

"Well, I've got to go now, Ma."

"Good. Bob's got our potato on the table."

"Don't eat too much."

And there's a click.

Growing Boy

For about a year now, I've served one main purpose in Bar Mitzvahzilla's life: I am his yardstick. He walks up to me each day, assesses my height, and then tries to get me to stand back to back with him in front of a mirror so he can see if he's taller than me.

Since I've actually been shrinking while he's been growing, this is kind of a win/win situation for him. What could be better than having a really old mom whose bones have been eaten away by all of her asthma medications? My last bone density scan was so alarming that my doctor had to put me on 7000 units of Vitamin D per day and a bone density medication once a week, and I'm only 49. At this rate, what will I look like at 59? All I know is that each day when I get up I'm not sure whether all my vertebrae will simply slide down my spinal cord and pool at my feet.

But Bar Mitzvahzilla is a strapping, healthy young man. If I judge him by the size of his feet or hands, I'd say he's going to be a veritable Jewish giant - which means he'll be over 5'8". He's happy about this. He's still at the age where he wants to be older and bigger than everyone else. Of course, he also really likes having two fangs growing in his mouth, so his opinion is pretty unreliable.

To get bigger, Bar Mitzvahzilla is eating a lot of food. I had heard this was going to happen but I don't think I understood the sheer magnitude of it, that feeding my son would end up being the bane of my existence.

Since I am the village idiot when it comes to cooking or feeding my family, always found wandering aimlessly in my kitchen, trying to scrub out a spot on the counter that's actually part of the granite design, I'm not exactly suited for this job of growing a child. When I get him home from school I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be to prepare some kind of slap dash dinner. I manage to prepare something and then he is full. After dinner's done, amazed at my kitchen prowess, I collapse on my bed only to hear, one hour later, the call: he's hungry again. He needs dinner number two. And an hour after that? Dinner number three. It's actually impossible for me to think of three original, interesting things to make for dinner all on the same night. To me, three ideas should equal three days of dinner out of the way forever.

Bar Mitzvahzilla, on the other hand, has got a pretty indiscriminate appetite. Basically, he'll eat anything that's not a vegetable. If it has picante sauce on it, that's really good. If it's a la mode - good too. If told to make his own dinner, he will make salsa and chips.

I won't even get into the sheer logistics of trying to sit down and enjoy a meal at the same table with him - his meaty paws grabbing all the food before anyone can get their hands on it, him watching us for a lull in our eating to ask if we're going to finish our food - and if we're not, can he have it? The mad scramble as he tries to eat everything on his plate at once, till food is scattered everywhere - crumbs on the floor, his shirt splattered, food in his hair.

And when he's full, he's so done that it's like he was never hungry at all. He looks up from his plate and doesn't know what we're all staring at. He stands up, pushes his chair back till it hits the wall, and stalks away from the table, leaving his plate.

Driving With Bar Mitzvahzilla

We're leaving an ice skating rink: my daughter, her friend who's been coming along on our Mom Camp adventures, and Bar Mitzvahzilla, who's in the front seat with me.

I don't like having my son in the front seat. He gets a little too excited with the world view from this unexpected position. He starts out by pressing or pulling everything on the dashboard, saying, "What's this?" "What does this do?" and then before you know it, he's reset my clock to zero, pulled up the parking brake, and shifted the car into reverse all at the same time. Or he starts fiddling with the radio and suddenly I'm listening to La Campesina, the all-Spanish station.

This time all the kids have the smoothies that I bought them at the ice skating rink. Bar Mitzvahzilla's is almost gone, but not completely. As far as he's concerned, there's a lot left. As I drive towards home, he begins fidgeting with his cup. It seems there's a tiny bit of smoothie in that cup - down in the very bottom of that cup - trapped in a forgotten crevice between the ice cubes. He's going to get it out if it's the last thing he does.

He slurps through the straw, then he adjusts the straw, first one position then another, slurping at each spot, like this is some kind of never-empty cup.

I say, "I'm sure that's empty now. Can you stop that?"

He says, "There's more in here, Mom."

So while I'm driving and thinking about the similarities between my life and a Laurel and Hardy sketch, he's shaking the ice, tilting the cup at various angles, and continuing to slurp, until finally, right when I get exasperated and say, "Can you just stop it already?" he dumps the whole cup of ice on his head.

Driving with Bar Mitzvahzilla. Looks like a man, acts like a monkey.

Balabusted

Every single day of the school year, I make my children's lunches. I don't know exactly how I lucked into this chore; it's certainly not due to my skill in the kitchen. Maybe it's because I don't work.

So, because I'm the village idiot when it comes to food, I get the lunch-making down to a science. I open the two lunch boxes and, like a conveyer belt, I throw in chips, nutri-grains, fruit, and a juice bag - everyday the same stuff, just twice as much stuff for the human garbage can - Bar Mitzvahzilla - as for the daughter. And then I make sandwiches for each, always being very careful in my slow-witted kind of way that I don't replicate the sandwich I made the day before. No. The kids must have variety, I insist on that.

Then last week I volunteered to help with my daughter's third grade class during lunchtime. Even I couldn't help but notice that there was some discrepancy there.

Some of the kids had the school's hot lunches. Others had fast food lunches that their parents had picked up and brought in for them. There were children whose lunches were lovingly packed - individual containers filled with stir fry, with spaghetti, with taco meat and taco shells, with little individual servings of every food group on the food pyramid. One child even had homemade soup in a thermos. Only my daughter sat there listlessly unwrapping her soggy sandwich out of a piece of torn tin foil, opening a baggy full of stale chips, then giving me a dirty look while she ate it. Oh.

It's really weird that I'm not better at this. I should have it in my genes to be better at this. I come from a long line of balabustas - extraordinary Jewish housewives. Women who could slaughter and then pluck a chicken while giving birth to a child, biting off the umbilical cord with their teeth, and then finish ploughing a field. My paternal grandmother was an object of great awe to me; I heard the stories over and over of how she breastfed my father until he was five. I would imagine my father as a kindergartner - even though he was in Poland and it was the early 1930s - running in their home, grabbing a quick lunch of some breastmilk, and then running back out again. My mother made this sound very logical, like that breastmilk was all the food the family had and only that kept them from starving. Now that's a balabusta.

As an immigrant, my mother might have been a little spotty on the American stuff like driving, or coming to parent/teacher conferences, or English, but she was a phenomenal balabusta. She raised seven children without any evidence of those seven children showing anywhere in the house at all.

But me? The evidence is in: laundry dried so long it comes out burned. Clothes wrinkly from sitting in laundry baskets for days. Sandwiches in my children's lunchboxes 200 days of the year.

Definitely balabusted.

Shopping With the Food Police

Today I went shopping with the Food Police - that would be my husband. Since we are off one day a week together (okay, I'm really off every day) we go to a warehouse store on Thursdays. There we get to amuse all the other shoppers by fighting up and down each aisle about what I want to buy and what he doesn't.

I have many nostalgic memories of food I ate as a kid. I want to raise my kids on this nostalgia. I want to give them my childhood in Skokie, almost all of it. Like the Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres on TV and Spaghettios and Frosted Flakes in their mouths. I want them to have the idyllic childhood I had but without the Holocaust things, of course. So that's how I shop. I buy food to make them happy, excited. I look at the DVDs for fun and more fun things to watch. I'm like a ten-year-old in a grocery store.

This drives the Food Policeman nuts because he's a grown up married to a baby. He wants the kids to fall in love with lettuce and with unflavored Cherrios. If he was the mom, he'd probably have a food pyramid chart as art work.

I just need to face it: my husband is really meant to be the wife. He's good at cleaning the house, washing the dishes, and he cooks a good nutritious meal. He can shop a list at the grocery store with so many coupons they finally pay him to get out of the store. And so where does that leave me? Under arrest by the Food Police.