Salon.com > Jodi Greenbaum

Everything you’ve got

Tue, 12 Sep 2000 19:56:00 +0000

Everything You've Got

1 pound ground beef

1 cup rice

1 cup boiling water

1 beef bouillon cube

1 cup frozen or canned mixed vegetables

sliced tomato (optional)

garlic powder

salt

pepper

Brown meat. Drain. Add rice, water, seasonings and vegetables. Cook 20 minutes.

Jam Roll

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup margarine

1 cup sugar

5 tablespoons milk

Jam

Mix ingredients for dough. Shape into a rectangle. Spread with jam. Roll up. Cut into slices. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.

Rich food, poor food

Tue, 12 Sep 2000 19:00:00 +0000

I don't remember a lot about my childhood. The details of day-to-day living are long obscured. But I do recall the steaks. Every Friday night, we would eat thick, sizzling steaks in dimly lit restaurants. It was a ritual for our family. Even now I can see the red vinyl booths and the tasseled menus we read in the flickering candlelight. My father tipped generously. He always knew the waitress, the owner and whoever was playing the piano.

After the steaks, my father's third scotch and my mother's 10th cigarette, he would invariably call over some employee, a smiling woman whose tired lines were partially obscured by the dark of the restaurant.

"Tell Charlie he doesn't pay you enough," my father would say, his voice a slurred mixture of the Texas orphanage he grew up in and the phony Eastern prep school accent he'd mastered over the years.

We'd marvel at the fresh 20 he was giving away.

Not everyone we knew ate in such restaurants. Many of our friends didn't eat out at all. We knew we were different, and lucky, and set apart from the kids whose parents made them order hamburgers on the rare occasion -- a birthday, a holiday -- that they were allowed to dine out at all.

Pink ladies, pupus and rumaki

Tue, 11 Jul 2000 23:15:00 +0000

Pink lady
In a blender, mix 1 1/2 ounces gin, 1 1/2 ounces applejack, 1 ounce lemon juice, one teaspoon sugar or sugar syrup, one teaspoon grenadine, one egg white and one cup of ice. Serves two.

Pupus
Mix 1 cup sliced black olives, 1/2 cup green onions, 1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese, 1/2 cup mayonnaise, 1/2 teaspoon curry and salt to taste. Spoon onto English muffins. Broil. Cut into quarters and serve.

Rumaki
Marinate 1/2 pound chicken livers in 1/2 cup soy sauce and a minced garlic clove for several hours. Combine each chicken liver with a canned water chestnut and wrap in bacon. Secure with a toothpick. Broil.

Dinner at 8

Tue, 11 Jul 2000 21:37:00 +0000

In my family, we had dinner at 8. Growing up, I labored under the somewhat romantic, and probably false, notion that this was civilized. Six o'clock dinners were for people who thought Sizzler was the place to go for a steak, tuna casseroles were haute cuisine and fruit salad was the stuff that came in small cans, sweetened by a syrupy sauce that never could quite mask the cold, metallic taste.

What did my own mother serve? There were meatloaves and steaks, and her prized fried chicken recipe. Nothing really spectacular. But by the time dinner rolled around at 8, whatever it was sure tasted great to a couple of hungry kids.

Why did we eat so late? My mother was an artist, or thought so for a while, and she would do anything possible to separate herself from the crowd she called "the cotton-dress mothers."

Needless to say, what my mother wore while she was cooking mattered more than anything she served. Her dresses were always short, often low-cut and usually worn with sexy black pumps (though I do recall a pair of lovely, pale pink, T-strapped heels).