The Best and Worst from Mom’s Kitchen

The Best

Mom baked lemon meringue pies twice that I remember. Both times, she banned us from the kitchen and spent hours working her magic. She prepared everything from fresh ingredients and it was all we could do to wait, taunted by the aroma and sight of her two masterpieces that had to cool and couldn’t be touched till after supper. One was for us; the other for special guests. We dutifully ate whatever dinner she served, knowing that we’d have no dessert otherwise. When we finally got a slice of her pie, we devoured it. The foamy meringue bubbled as it melted in my mouth, the smooth lemon filling was a perfect combination of sweet and tart, and the solid graham cracker crust was the consummate complement to the meringue and filling. Of course, we asked for seconds and gobbled that down as fast as the first. Mom was annoyed that we’d eaten her pie so fast given all the time she’d taken to prepare it. But, imagine if we hadn’t liked it after all that effort!

The Worst

We kids used to have our supper in the kitchen at 5 p.m., about an hour before Dad got home, so that Mom and he could “eat in peace”. One evening, Mom made bow ties with kasha. Normally, we enjoyed the subtle nutty flavour of the kasha with the fun-to-eat pasta but that evening, it tasted bad. None of us would eat it so, by the time Dad got home, we were still hunched miserably in our seats waiting for bedtime to free us. Dad lectured us about appreciating her cooking and how hard he worked to earn money for our food, having no sympathy for our picky palates. But when he ate the first few bites off his plate, he had to agree that it tasted awful. It turned out that Mom had absent-mindedly poured dish soap into the electric frying pan that still held our dinner!