Mom was not a cook!

I was ten years old before I realized that fried eggs did not have to be tough and have a chewy brown, lacey edge. Once I had fried eggs at a friend’s home without this adornment, and insisted my eggs at home not have this quality, Mom (Aldine Busch) really tried to fry my eggs in the manner I wanted, but succeeded less than half the time. I think the basic problem was that she never really grasped the concept of how the gas stove flames could be turned high or low under the grease filled cast iron skillet; she always had the flames turned as high as they would go. She was aware of her cooking deficiencies and occasionally tried to improve upon them. I remember once when I was about 7 years old, and we were living in an apartment on Summit St. in Kansas City, MO. Actually, this was just before my Mom and Dad (Clyde Estes) separated and divorced, though I’m sure this incident had nothing to do with THAT. Mom purchased a ‘pressure cooker’. She was excited about the contraption and thought all her ‘cooking’ problems were over. The very first time she used it, it exploded. Luckily, no one had been in the kitchen, so no one got hurt. The noise was impressive though, people in the adjoining apartments (it was a two story brick 4-plex) heard it and came running, and there was food everywhere, the kitchen walls, and even on the ceiling! Mom immediately gave the bright shiny contraption to her friend Betty Ford, (who helped her clean the kitchen), who used it successfully, and teased Mom about it, for years. Mom had one way of cooking anything, burned! She could and did, burn toast in a toaster, scraping off the ‘darkness’ with a butter knife with short fast motions, dark crumbs falling into the kitchen sink, leaving me with a very skinny slice of bread. While she was removing the burned part of the bread, she would remind me that we were lucky to have a toaster, instead of having to toast bread in the oven. I do not think Mom liked to cook, it was not one of her life interests, just a means to an end, eating. She liked to eat though, but her idea of ‘food’ and ‘meal’ were not the usual. In her defense however was the fact that she always worked full-time, and we did not always have a car, both of which tend to make shopping for, and preparing food a little more difficult. Mom had three ‘meal’ modalities; sandwiches, eating out, and fried, burned whatever. We ate a lot of sandwiches! In the mid 1960’s she really came into her own, as far as food preparation, with the fad of the Lazy Susan. At that time, it was just the two of us and we lived in California, in a great two-bedroom pool apartment on Verdugo Rd. in Glendale. Mom had a good job, a car (a white Chevy Nova) and I was in my late teens (and fairly proficient at cooking by then). Maybe Mom couldn’t cook, but she could clean veggies, cut salami, cube cheese, take crackers out of boxes, olives, and pickles out of jars with the best of them. From that point on, she viewed ‘balanced’ meals in a completely different way.