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Monday, August 6, 2018

Menu Memories

 
Today, I decided that I needed to make one tiny space in my house look like something other than an episode of Hoarders. OK, the smallest space is the upstairs bathroom.

That included a shelf where the overflow of recipe books has had a home. I sorted multiple notebooks of recipes I'll never try (but once thought I might), put a 15" stack of recipe books in the giveaway pile, and had quite a few smiles from records I'd kept over the years.

My relationship with cooking has been... long. I keep saying I completed my lifetime quota of cooking more than ten years ago. I don't find any particular pleasure in cooking, but if I'm going to do it, I want to do it well. And now, I like my own cooking better than most everything I can get by eating out unless it costs WAY too much. However, I'm pretty content on the rare occasions when food just appears at mealtime, and I didn't have to do anything to make that happen.

With all that introduction, here are some menu memories for you to chuckle over. First up, we have bicycle trips. I cooked at first out of the back of a trailer, and then out of the back of a bus, for 20-50 people for weeks on end.

kitchen in the back of a bus

Just in case teenagers weren't hungry enough already, have them ride a bicycle 100 miles and then see what they can eat.

bicycle trip

Here's the beginning of page one of the kitchen equipment.

kitchen equipment list

And the step-by-step for Cream of Wheat for 40-45.

directions for Cream of Wheat

Moving along to when we had boys of our own. They pretty much thought they were going to die if I wasn't home to cook. I'm pretty sure this menu page is from a week that I made a trip to Illinois. I packed separate boxes and labeled everything and left instructions. They seem to have all lived.

menu page

One of the things I liked to do each year was fix a big fancy Christmas feast to which we invited a number of friends. We could seat about 18, which this page says we did have in 1989.

Christmas dinner

I was able to match the menu page with an actual picture of that meal.

menu page

And last, and perhaps most amusing, is a list (who knows why I saved it) that I made to help us through the 9 months that Omer, Steve, and I lived in a 20x20 space with no stove or oven while the house we are in now was being built. We had a fridge, an electric frypan and a microwave.

small house

I listed meals that could be cooked with those appliances and no oven.

no oven menu list

Once again, we can safely say that no one starved during that time period.

This post was a little more personal than some, but I got such a kick out of finding these things. It's really what today was about.

And what did I have for dinner? A microwaved potato with butter and greens on top. Fancy cookin' eh?

Oh, and I did finish cleaning that one bathroom.

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3 comments:

Ann said...

Fun memories. It's always good to look back at what we were doing way back when.
I think if I had to live in a 20 x 20 space for that long, one of my kids would have killed the other...lol

Grace said...

Chicken milk? Am I reading that right?

Sharkbytes said...

Ann- fortunately, only one kid was still home at that point!

Grace- I wondered if anyone would catch that! I may have to do an explanatory post :D