To the Mother

Source: liveinternet.ru via Mariya on Pinterest

To my Mama, who kissed away tears and hugged away fears, who taught me to love, to be kind and respectful, who shared everything with me from wisdom to wishes, who stood hand-in-hand with my Daddy and made me who I am today.

To his Mom, who raised such a selfless man, who raised such an intelligent man, such a goofy and loving man, who raised the man who would be my soulmate, my best friend, and my partner.

To the Mommy, who kisses a toddler's boo-boos, who looks at him with her heart in her eyes, who found the love of her life and the sweetness of a child's hugs.

To the Mother, who didn't have to be a mother, who chose to be the best mother they could ask for, who chose to raise them right, who chose to love them with her entire heart.

To the Mother, who is yet to be, who waits patiently and wishes and hopes and dreams, who will one day be who she is meant to be, will one day love the child she is meant to love.

To the Mother, who has gone away, who watches out from above, who is always in your heart, wishing all the best for you and loving you from far away.

To the Mother, whose chicks have flown the nest, who wrestles with her babies having grown up, who is always there for you even when you're the adult she dreamed of.

To the Mothers, who struggle everyday, who juggle everyday, who stress and worry and love anyway.

Happy Mother's Day

A Whole Mess of Greens

Over the holiday weekend, I challenged myself. As a burgeoning Southern cook, I like to do this from time to time. I like to break out of my comfort zone of microwaved pepperonis and instant Ramen and attempt something new and exciting. I'm complicated that way.

During my short and varied stint as a "cook," I've managed to prepare a variety of traditional Southern recipes and dishes. Buttermilk biscuits and gravy, shrimp and grits, homemade macaroni and cheese, cornbread, hashbrown casserole, cubed steak, the list goes on and on. But the one dish that has eluded me, the one dish that I have avoided preparing out of fear and intimidation has been turnip greens. Now, in the South, we have this thing. We like to eat. A lot. We like to eat all manner of things, especially fried things and yummy vegetable things (sometimes the yummy vegetable things are one and the same with the fried things, which only makes them better). Turnip greens fall into the yummy vegetables category. In fact, I would probably say that turnip greens take the cake as the yummiest of all the vegetables but that's only my opinion, and you can take it for what it's worth.

As a great lover of turnip greens, and other types of greens which I'll discuss in another post on another day, I have not deprived myself or my husband of them in the years since I left the nest and the comfort of my Mama's turnip greens. No, in fact, I prepare them quite frequently and shamelessly out of a can. I know. I should be horribly ashamed. To even refer to myself as a Southern cook is a gigantic lie, but for some reason, I haven't been able to work up the courage to make fresh greens. Something about the entire process is just a little frightening.

Out of the can. 

While I was grocery shopping on Saturday, I encountered my old nemesis on the vegetable aisle. It mocked me with its leafy goodness, taunted me with those long stems and its sheer bulk. Not to be outdone by a stinking vegetable, I snatched up two bunches of the offending stuff and wheeled around to my husband. "I'm cooking greens!" I declared, plopping the greens into the buggy.

Puzzled, he hazarded to reply with "sounds great" and wisely pushed the buggy on down the aisle.

When we got home, I chose to sit around for a couple of hours before starting dinner. I'm used to throwing something together in about an hour, so I didn't think anything of it when I started my meal of turnip greens and dried field peas at around 6:30pm. Needless to say, it was around 9:00pm before we ate.

A Whole Mess of Greens

After quick-soaking my field peas and washing and chopping my turnip greens, I finally got everything on the stove. The greens were a daunting task but not quite as daunting as I had anticipated. I was feeling pretty good about myself when we sat down at the table to my pretty little meal. Jeremy had done his part and grilled up some pork chops as well, so we had quite the feast before us.

I cut into the pork chop. Tender, juicy perfection. The husband fulfilled his role as grill master well. Next, I scooped up a fork full of those delicious smelling field peas. Not bad for my first time cooking dried peas. They weren't too dry or too tough. I turned to the greens next. My husband had already tried them and kept calling them the "feature" of the meal. I tried a tiny bite. Good flavor, the pork fat I'd cooked with them had done its job. Surprisingly, they were also very tender. But alas, the greens weren't perfect. Nope, I'd made a rookie mistake right out of the gate.

Sure, I'd washed the greens. Ran them through nice cold water in a colander. I had been talking to my Mama on the phone when I was washing them. "Be sure to wash them good." She'd warned. My response? An impatient and flippant, "Yeah, Mama, I know." Well, I'll sure know next time that just running water over greens doesn't hardly "wash" them. Those bites of crunchy, gritty turnip greens were a testament to that fact.

The moral to this story? What you've heard is true. Mamas sometime, every so often, do know best.

Have you ever tried greens? If so, have you ever tried cooking them?

The Biscuit Chronicles: Attempt 4 aka Biscuit Fail

Well, it was bound to happen at some point. And yesterday morning was as good a morning for it than any. I buckled under the tremendous pressure of the biscuit. I buckled, and I pulled out the Bisquick. Yes, sad but true. Bisquick's the go-to, get 'er done baking mix for complicated things like pancakes and dumplings, and I have used it several times before for making biscuits. I'd throw some milk in with the mix and shazam! Instant biscuit. But this was all before I changed my ways...long before the biscuit chronicles and back in the Age of the Canned Biscuit.

The title says it all. Literally.

But the saddest thing about this, Attempt 4 of the Biscuit Chronicles, was the fact that I couldn't even seem to make Bisquick biscuit right. I read on the box that I was supposed to roll out the dough to a 1/2 inch thick, and to me a 1/2 inch is apparently more like a 1/4 inch....and the resulting biscuit was very hard and flat. But hey, with cooking there are successes and failures and cop-outs. And this was definitely those last two. 

In other news, I had a pretty nice Saturday. Mama, me, and my husband went shopping for an upcoming trip to the North Georgia mountains next weekend. We stocked up on all of the "essentials," which mainly consisted of food; we're food-centric people. After the shopping expedition, we came back to my house where I prepared Baked Ziti for dinner. It's really rare that I get to cook for Mama (she usually does the cooking for get-togethers and such), and it was a nice treat to cook her dinner...a little payback I'd say for all the years she's spent cooking for me. And the best part? She seemed to enjoy the meal. I guess all daughters seek approval and validation from their mothers, but her enjoyment of the meal felt especially wonderful considering what a great cook she is. Every "yum" and "Katie, this is really good" was a feather in my cooking cap...definitely needed after the Bisquick Fail from the morning. 

Baked Ziti in my new Rachel Ray cookware. Can I get a "yum-o"?

It occurs to me that I'm always looking to my mother for reassurance and praise, and she's usually there to give it to me along with a hug and a "Go get 'em!", or otherwise to say something like, "Katie, don't you need to wax your eyebrows?! There's supposed to be two of them." Which is also very helpful. As much as we might fight against it growing up, most girls (women) eventually aspire to be their mothers. We aspire to be strong and loving and unselfish and kind. I hope that one day I'm even half the mother mine is, even if I am one who makes biscuits out of a box or a can every now and then. Heck, even Mama did it, too. 

What about you guys? Any pearls of wisdom you can share that your mothers used to share with you? Or the better question may be, have you become your mother?

PS - Can't leave my Daddy out. I'm a Daddy's girl to the bone. I was lucky to be blessed with two awesome parents.

PPS - Just in case you were wondering, a picture of the Bisquick Fail:

The one in the back corner is the giant biscuit from Hell. It tried to eat all the smaller biscuits. I saved them.