KitchenScraps: The Challenge of Cooking for Kids by Maralys Wills

Post #28 – Women’s Memoirs, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett

By Maralys Wills

LITTLE KIDS ARE so wonderfully accommodating. For breakfast each morning I gave my grammar school youngsters eggnogs. Back then I was a disciple of health food guru Adelle Davis, whose books I pored over as though she held the key to health’s Holy Grail, and for whom protein was the sine qua non of nutrition. Thanks to Davis and a blender, I loaded those morning gruels (as my husband, Rob, called them), with so much protein I probably sent my six children off each day into wild, high-energy orbits. They were so over-proteined I doubt they ate much lunch. But as youngsters they never complained. You put enough chocolate powder into the thickest, eggiest drink and you can make a kid actually like it.

But then our older children became teenagers, and my second son, Chris, swore I’d been putting strange ingredients in their eggnogs. I overheard him telling a friend, “She dumps in wheat germ and Brewer’s yeast and egg shells.”

Well, actually, he did see me adding shells once as a kind of calcium supplement, but then I reasoned the shells weren’t designed to eat, but only to hold the egg . . . and besides, even I found the sandy texture disgusting.

For a few years, as youngsters, Chris, Bobby, and Eric were willing to drink carrot juice. Then came a teenage revolt with Eric declaring, “I’m never touching that yucky stuff again,” and carrot juice vanished over the horizon and never reappeared.

As even our younger children became teenagers, their will-powers surfaced and I could no longer placate them with a one-eggnog-fits-all. Suddenly I was catering to a rebel army, where casseroles are anathema and the prevailing philosophy is that hamburgers are the only edible food.

This wouldn’t have been bad if the kids hadn’t pushed their individuality, assuring that no two hamburgers came out the same.

“You know I don’t eat tomatoes,” declared Bobby, “Why did you stick on tomatoes?”

“My hamburger’s raw,” said Eric.

“Mine isn’t,” said Chris. “It’s way too dry. ”

I’d finally had enough. “You want it wet?” I snapped at Chris. “Go top it with ice cream. You can have hamburger a-la-mode. ”

Come to think of it, after the eggnogs, Chris probably didn’t think that so strange.

IF INDIVIDUALITY IN food were limited to hamburgers, mealtime with teenagers might have been tolerable. But that wasn’t the case. No two liked eggs cooked the same, or wanted the same pie at Christmas, or would tolerate the same ingredients in their casseroles. But then most of them didn’t eat casseroles anyway. By the time they got through picking out all the items they didn’t like, what was left on their plates was no longer a casserole. It was a collection of little piles of separate, discarded ingredients.

I accept the fact that during most of my kids’ growing-up years I tried too hard; I made a mistake, long ago, when I began raising six only-children. I should have foreseen the consequences–that addressing each whim and quirk is impossible when it’s one of you and six of them. If I could once again find a food that served as many purposes as those multi-duty eggnogs, I’d now be serving it every day.

Recipe for All-Purpose Eggnog:
In a blender, put:
1 glass cold, 2% milk
2 raw eggs (in 20 years, they never made us sick)
3 Tbls dry, powdered skim milk
3 Tbls powdered chocolate Quick
2 cubes ice
Blend on high until frothy. Pour into glasses and serve.
Serves two (or one of my hungry teenagers).

My husband liked them, too. He says, “Oh, you mean that gruel I regularly spilled down my shirt on the way to work?”

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Author Statement:  As the mother of six children you get certain benefits.  They may be hard to cook for, but they’re great fodder for books!   Among my three memoirs–the serious Higher Than Eagles, and the lighter, A Circus Without Elephants, and its sequel, A Clown in the Trunk,–if you took out the “kid” stories, there wouldn’t be much left.  For my husband and me, our children have made the world turn on its axis. We reveled in our sons’ hang gliding days, brought up short by two tragedies. Yet we found a way to go on–and yes, because we still had other children to love.  If there’s any consistency among memoirs, it will surely be that children are half the reason most of us are writers.  –Maralys Wills 

By the way, my All Purpose Eggnog recipe may not appeal to you. Perhaps you’ll like the following one better. This meatloaf recipe was made up one day because these are the ingredients I happened to have in the refrigerator.  The meatloaf has been a hit ever since. 

Maralys Wills’ Meatloaf 
2 pounds of ground beef  (Medium lean–the least lean beef tends to be dry)
1 large can Niblets corn (or any good canned corn)
2 can tomato sauce–l large, l small
2 eggs
1/3 package of frozen onions
1 T salt, scant TBL
Pepper–optional, but light.  
 
Mix all ingredients (except a small portion of large can and all of the small can tomato sauce), in large bowl
Spread meatloaf in oven-safe casserole dish
Spread remaining cans of tomato sauce over the top, like frosting. 
Bake 1 Hour at 350.     
Serves 6

Here are links to three of the books that Maralys Wills has written:

memoir writing
writing
memoir vignette
memoir scrapbooking
memoir scrapbooking recipe
recipe eggnog
recipe meatloaf

Tagged as: family story, Memoir Vignette, Treasured Family Recipe