This is Molly.
This is a Molly meal.
Molly was my grandmother, and while she died in 2007, she lives on in our hearts and in our food. Watching her and my mom in the kitchen cultivated my love of cooking. I visited my Aunt Jane this weekend, and she and I bartered computer lessons for a trunk full of canned and frozen food. (Homemade, of course.)
Hey look, Alton Brown is on the bartering bandwagon!
Every time I visit my aunt, she makes a Molly meal and then gives me the leftovers. Lucky me! I get to enjoy Molly meals for the next week.
What exactly is a Molly meal, you ask? Well, until I was eight, my family lived about a mile from Grandma and Aunt Jane. We went to their house for dinner every Sunday night. These are some of my fondest memories from Madisonville, and this is the quintessential meal we ate. Here are requirements for a Molly meal:
- Cucumber and onion salad with vinegar
- Peeled and sliced tomatoes. Do not skip the crucial peeling step. (My sad looking Kroger tomatoes will have to do until Ripley tomatoes come in this summer.)
- Corn. This is a must. No alternatives.
- Green beans (Limas are an acceptable alternative.)
- Ham (I remember sometimes having grilled chicken as a child, but ham is the way to go.)
- Sister Shubert roll(s)
Questions of the Day: What is the quintessential meal from your childhood? Do you still eat it? What memories does it evoke?
Ha - I love it!
ReplyDeleteIt sort of sucks because when I was a kid and we had family dinners with my mom's side, my grandmother and great aunts would make traditional Polish food. But since I was a kid, I would have nothing to do with stuffed cabbage, pierogis, kielbasa soup, etc. (As an adult, [ie, 100x more adventurous eater], I'd LOVE to have some homemade Polish food, but the cooks have either passed on, or passed on their aprons as they got older.)
Another thing they made, though, was "BBQ ribs." I put it in quotes because it's not like anything I've ever seen before. The BBQ sauce is made on the stove - but it's not like "normal" bbq sauce. It's not smoky, and is pretty tomato-y with a super runny consistency. Then they'd smother the ribs in the sauce and bake them on low in the oven for 8-10 hours or something crazy.
I literally didn't know ribs could be made any other way. So you can imagine my surprise when, maybe middle school-ish, I first went to a BBQ restaurant!