Thursday, February 24, 2011

Cooking

I didn't have very many options to make meals those first several weeks before we got to go grocery shopping. Mom and Daddy had given us several boxes filled with food and LV's parents had given us a few quarts of canned goods. But there was still a lot of other things that I needed.

After surveying my meager supplies one evening and not wanting to make mashed potatoes and green beans again I happened to remember the meat pockets we used to make. I opened a can of hamburger and crumbled it into a bowl shredded the last bit of cheese that my parents had given and mixed it together. I made a batch of pie dough and then created a lot of little halfmoons filled with the meat filling. I was pleased with the results and placing them on my new teflon cookie sheet I popped them into the oven. Once they were done baking I would remove the oven from the top of the stove and make hamburger gravy to spoon over the meat pockets.

When LV came in we sat at the table to enjoy our meal. The pockets were beautifully flaky and I was feeling quite pleased until we took a bite. They tasted beyond horrible and worse than anything I had ever tried eating before. They didn't taste like food but more like teflon.

Since we couldn't eat it I didn't have much choice but make another bowl of mashed potatoes. It always took quite a while to prepare a meal on a kerosene stove since the flames were so far away from the pots. It was late before we had eaten and got everything cleared away. The meat pockets were still on the table waiting to be taken care of.

Looking out the window I saw Teddy, our Border Collie pup laying on the grass. I opened the window and dumped them out. He could have something extra to eat tonight.

The next morning after we were done with the milking and I was headed for the house I happened to see all of the meat pockets laying in the yard right under his parents bedroom window. I was afraid they would get up at any minute and see them laying there and hurriedly gathered them all up and took them out to the barn and tossed them on the manure spreader.

I hoped that I would be able to start making good meals soon. So far they had been pretty bland and boring.

19 comments:

  1. That's one reason I don't use teflon. That and it is bad for ur health. Sorry to hear they tasted horrible! Isn't cooking an adventure???!!???

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  2. Oh, those first days of cooking for our husband presents some good things and complications! At least we have creative minds and husbands that were hungry enough to practically eat anything we could make!!!

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  3. Teddy sounds like he has got it in for you. First by running to your father-in-law with an embarrassing garment and now piling your meat pockets under their bedroom window. Oy!

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  4. You mean the dog didn't want the meat pockets?? That's rough.

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  5. I'm not superstitious at all, but isn't it aggravating how wrong things go when you really want them to go right. I think that must be how they came up with the Murphy's Law idiom. Thank the Lord for mashed potatoes, anyway. :)

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  6. I had a chuckle over the meal mishap. Not that it was funny that your meal was ruined but I remembered a few of my early cooking disasters when I tried so hard to make a good meal. I only use stainless steel pans, and have been using the same ones for 24 years now. I bet you are able to look back at that incident with a bit of humor now but at the time I'm thinking it was about one of the worst things a new bride can experience.

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  7. This reminds me of the first time I made sausage gravey and biscuits for Felipe. It looked like good gravy in the pan but it was so awful.
    Felipe ended up teaching me how to make proper sausage gravy.

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  8. I've done much the same...I remember trying to cook roast beef with no experience whatsoever...it was like shoeleather!

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  9. Oh no! The idea sounds like a good one - did the Teflon just ruin them, or did something else go wrong? I'm also really curious about how y'all made the canned hamburger....

    I had such a poor track record with cooking when my husband and I were first setting up house that on more than one occasion I declared that I would never cook again!

    I cooked all the time when I was at home with my parents, but I didn't cook things that were complicated or required a lot of technique or finesse, and definitely no 'main dish' items. So I wasn't as prepared to cook in the real world as I had always thought.

    My mother and grandmothers had been dead for many years by the time I really needed their insight/oversight in the kitchen, and not having them to turn to further compounded my sense of failure and grief at losing them so early.

    Fortunately, my husband looks back on those early days with much more humor than I did for years; those are not my fondest memories! I threw myself into learning to cook properly soon after our son was born and now I feel confident that I can handle most dishes - and I'm trying to teach my husband to cook some of our regular meals. I can also take criticism better than I could at first because I usually know what I'm doing wrong or what I could have changed instead of feeling that something turned out horrible but having no idea what to do differently the next time around.

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  10. Doesn't it just break your heart when a cooking project goes wrong! All that food...gone to waste. I'm so thankful that we have chickens...they will eat just about anything! I don't feel so badly about trying new recipes with them around!

    Thanks for sharing your wonderful stories!
    God bless,
    Laura

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  11. Man oh days! I wish I could remember the first meal I cooked for my man but I simply can't. may if something would have gone wrong I could remember.huh Loving your stories so much I hope you never stop writing.

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  12. My first meal as a wife had my husband running in to put out the fire on the stove the minute he pulled up from work. Thanks for sharing.

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  13. The meals may have been bland and boring, but your life surely was not!

    Thank you for sharing these memories.
    ...Marsha

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  14. Oh dear. What an embarrassing and unpleasant experience this must have been for you!

    It reminds me of the time that I tried to make breadsticks without yeast. The recipe mentioned that yeast was "optional." So, I made them without yeast, and to my dismay, those were some pretty hard and tasteless breadsticks. That will NEVER happen again!

    -Lady Rose

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  15. We can laugh now, right? This was a few years ago ... HAHAHAHA!!!! Been there, done that!!!! Just laughing with you, friend! Finding them half buried would have been even funnier :-)

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  16. Ahh those first few weeks of marriage are always hard but really funny to look back on! Blessings, Joanne

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  17. Even when you've had a lot of practice with something things can still sometimes not go as planned. Besides, it sounds to me like it wasn't your cooking skills that made them taste so bad. :)

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  18. Funny that the dog wouldn't eat the meat pockets. They sounded so delicious, I was sure they would be good. Oh, well. I think we all have a few newlywed stories of meals that didn't quite measure up.

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  19. It is always so disappointing when you try to make a nice meal and it is a flop! I have had that happen too many times to even count anymore!

    BTW - are you in PA? I thought I read "Somerset" in one of your posts. I live just north of Pittsburgh.

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