A Taste of Home

I couldn’t fall asleep last night. Pair that with being on a diet and you might understand why I laid in bed dreaming about food. What seemed so strange was for the first time in my entire life, I dreamt of my mom’s fried chicken. It was an experience not at all unlike when I was pregnant (which I can assure you, I am not) when I craved thousand island dressing. On anything. Just get.me.the.dressing.NOW.

It took me well into my adult years to realize that my mother wasn’t a particularly good cook. Not in the sense that she cooked anything gourmet or complicated, anyway. She was a farmer’s daughter and she married a farmer’s son and in that regard, she cooked meat and potatoes just fine. A complete list of spices in her cabinet would probably not exceed ten items and that’s including salt and pepper. I never had a complaint about her cooking growing up, but I learned shortly after I was married that dicing up an onion or a green pepper or even using an actual real clove of garlic wasn’t something reserved for Julia Child.

While I tend to cook with a few more spices and occasionally producing something not served in a small-town diner, I am still a far cry from a “good cook”. LM would strongly disagree, but his only comparison is his father, who never cooks. (As a side note: I am firmly convinced that to impress ANY male with your cooking ability, simply make deviled eggs. Men cannot get deviled eggs from a diner, a chain restaurant or the local convenience store. But they LOVE them! If you can master this simple side dish, you’ll have him in the palm of your hand!) I can cook well enough that LM and I eat a variety of dishes, but when I think about having guests over for dinner I honestly have nothing in my own repertoire worth cooking for company.

All of this is to say that to be lying awake in bed dreaming of my mother’s fried chicken is like Lance Armstrong saying he’s thinking of taking a bike ride down to his local library or an opera enthusiast saying he was moved by his three year old’s school play performance.

There was nothing remarkable about her fried chicken. I don’t think a single spice was used, it was simply chicken coated with flour, fried in vegetable oil in her electric skillet. But then she made mashed potatoes. Again, nothing added, no sour cream, no cream cheese, no cream even, just potatoes and milk with maybe a dab of butter. Most of all, I could nearly taste the white gravy. Chunks of chicken from the bottom of the skillet still floating around in the gravy. She would always ask me to taste and I never refused! A dash of salt and a sprinkle of pepper and it was perfect. Last night I could envision a cob of Midwest yellow sweet corn, smothered in butter, salt and pepper. If I had to top the meal off, I would have the cheesecake she used to make for my birthday. Or maybe the spice cake she made on a regular basis, 2/3 covered with icing, the last third left plain or sprinkled with powered sugar, just the way she liked it. Or perhaps the French cookies that she made. Mmmm….

Thinking about her chicken, I could nearly taste it. I could picture the table full of my family. I could see the plates, see the glass of milk at the top of my setting. I could even hear the phone ring in the middle of the meal like it always seemed to do.

And then I fell asleep. With a little piece of home stuck in my head.