Wednesday, February 27, 2008

My sister sent me a quart of New York maple syrup for my birthday. Do these people know me or what? My dad once tried to make maple syrup on the kitchen stove. It was a mess and oooh, was my mother pissed. You have to tap all the trees and gather a buttload of sap. Then you boil it for, oh, a month or something. There is a lot of foam you're supposed to skim off. Well, dad wasn't home all day so that chore fell to good old mom, which did not make her happy. It usually boiled over and then became a hardened rock-like substance which I think she had to chip off. THEN the stuff burned. Yeah. After that, we bought maple syrup from road side stands. Sugar houses are a whole big deal and if it boils over, you haven't created sculptural forms on the kitchen range. Gawd, my mom was so picky. Sheesh.

Then there was the time my mother pressure cooked chestnuts. The pressure cooker blew up and there was this big KERBLAM on the ceiling. It was there for a loooonng time. Did I tell you that my mother was a terrible cook. When she burned the peas, she called them 'barbequed' and we ate them. Yum. I learned to cook out of desperation. And I discovered that scallops don't have to be rubbery globs, gag inducing.

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