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A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi. (In front of you, a precipice. Behind you, wolves.)

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Sack Lunches and Stinging Nettles

Can I just say that I really love deviled eggs? Which is weird since I really hate egg salad sandwiches. 

Mom used to make our lunches (what a dedicated mom!) every day. She put the most horrendous things in them sometimes. I could never get into pimento loaf (might as well be blood sausage or tongue for all I cared) or meatloaf sandwiches. A plain old PB&J would have done every day for me. But mom liked to change it up.

I suppose I should have been happy that she didn't jam some of the naturalist bleah in there that she tried to make us swill down at dinner. There would have been nothing to keep me from heartlessly abandoning a stinging nettle salad in my locker along with all the nasty sandwiches. Cattail pancakes wouldn't have made it past the neighbor's trashcan.

I never wanted to simply dump my lunch because my dad was a teacher at my school. He wouldn't have appreciated my wasting food. 

Or so I thought. 

The night my mom mashed turnips like mashed potatoes I learned just how far Dad would tolerate the stuff. We all got huge dollops of "potatoes". When Dad tasted them, he said, "D. if you ever do that again..." and then he schlopped it all back into the bowl. My sibs and I grinned at each other and followed suit. That was the only Get-out-of-jail-free card we ever got at dinnertime that I can remember.

We ate peach pits (for cancer prevention), various kinds of mushrooms they'd found in the woods, dandelion greens, various roots, and KM (some kind of tonic which tasted the way I would think horse urine would taste) to mention a few.

Somehow we managed to make it to adulthood intact. I don't even think any of us sustained major brain damage from it. I DID have a fairly smelly locker until the dude who had his locker above me stopped dropping his books on my head long enough to protest the stench. My master plan (make the guy move out of that locker through stench warfare) ended in failure when he complained to the janitor.

I think I pulled 53 lunches out of there. Unfortunately Mom was complaining that she never had lunch containers anymore, so I had to go through and remove the containers and take them home to be detoxed. I probably could have done mold studies on the hairy little things.

Huh. I think I'm hungry for a couple of deviled eggs.

2 comments:

  1. I think I have an article in a page on my blog called It All Hurts. Some where on that is an article called It All Hurts: Eating. It's not as well written as yours, but I know you would enjoy it. I sure could relate to this one. I had dessicated liver and brewer's yeast smoothies when I was a kid.

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  2. You should shoot me your blog addy.

    Yeah. Dessicated liver is pretty stiff. Were our moms friends before? :o)

    To be fair to my mom, she was a fantastic cook when she wasn't making turkey dressing or this other stuff. And I do know several things I could eat in the wild if I had to, now. You know, if I were starving...;o)

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