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One of the things that astonished me about my mother, a career Navy wife, is that she became an amazing cook who cooked nearly everything under the sun you can imagine. Foods from all cultures, Indian, Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese, you name it. She became quite well known for her cooking at the stations my father served at...and was in much demand.

When my mom and dad got married, she couldn’t even cook scrambled eggs right, and put garlic in them on their first morning together after marriage, which my dad was in no way agreeable to! (the garlic, I mean)

But in the course of her life, with all the hosting of events she did, and raising six kids, she became an astonishingly good cook. We had maids when we lived in Japan and the Philippines, and my mother learned a lot from them. (She became very chummy with the maids, and had very egalitarian relationships with them.)

Her progression to master chef was not without its hiccups. She tried many things out on us, and once served us tripe in red sauce when I was a kid living at the Naval Base in Yokosuka, Japan.

As a kid, there are few foods more alien looking than tripe. It looked like they peeled off an alien’s skin and sliced it into strips, boiled it to a rubbery consistence, then dashed it with what looked like blood. We looked at my mother as if she were mad...as the Blue Danube china tureen came around the table.

Not a single one of us touched it. My mom was so pissed!

Another time later after my dad retired, she and my dad were having a major fight and my mom is making the dinner, banging the crap out of the pots and pans in anger, making spinach and rice, a family favorite. Very tasty, rice and spinach sauteed together in garlic and olive oil.

She is still steaming about the argument, and me and all my brothers, sisters and my dad (eight of us total, but I recall there were only four or five of us there that night) are sitting around the table when she comes over with the tureen of spinach and rice and slams it down angrily on the table. We all help ourselves and as I take my very first bite...

Crunch.

This is completely disgusting. The food has sand or grit in it. I look up, and all my brothers and sisters have momentarly paused after crunching on the sand. We all look at each other, not moving, and my father is still slowly chewing with an audible crunching sound.

My mom had been so upset she forgot to wash the spinach, and boy, was it dirty!

She looked at all of us and said “What? EAT! YOU HEARD ME! EAT!”

So we all took another mouthful...Crunch...Crunch...Crunch....you could actually HEAR it.

She sat down, and in anger, forked a mouthful into her mouth, bit down, and...Crunch...

She looked up at everyone who was just meekly looking back at her, and said “OH FOR GOD’S SAKE!” And jumped up, grabbed the tureen and threw the whole thing, tureen and all in the trash.

Then she just statrted to giggle, and it turned into a roaring laugh, after which we were all laughing, even my dad...:)

The infamous Spinach and Rice Dinner...

But the thing was, after my dad retired, the family homestead was a destination every Thursday night for dinner. We had a large extended family, with nieces and nephews, and fifteen people might show up, or just one. And sometimes, there would be guests, friends, etc.

I never understood how my mother did it, but there always seemed to be enough food, no matter how many or few showed up. When I asked her as an elderly woman how she did that, she said, “Oh, as a Navy wife, you learned how to do that. You would do a lot of entertaining as the wife of a senior officer, and never knew who would show up...so you always improvised and it became second nature...”