Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
he loved to eat at Grandma's house, as Grandma Medvee was known far and wide as a "great cook" (including baking), and not only was she skilled at cooking with many recipes, but she loved to make people happy with food, she liked to cook things and then watch the people eat them. She baked cherry pies and blueberry pies, pumpkin pies, but her best pie, everyone agreed, was her apple pie. Dougie liked her pumpkin pie the best, although it was almost a tie with the aforementioned apple pie.
Grandma's stuffed cabbage was a family favorite (cousins, aunts and uncles, second cousins, great aunts and great uncles, distant relatives that visited, plus Grandma and Grandpa's three daughters, Janie, Nancy [Dougie's Mama], and Linda, and through the years their children, Cherie and Robbie and Shannon and Sean), which were plump rolls of cabbage stuffed with something. Dougie was never sure what was in the stuffed cabbage, but he loved the dish dearly, as did everyone else (Grandma had a carnivore version and a vegetarian version, since Dada was a life-long vegetarian, and Donna picked up the habit, on and off through the years). Grandma's cabbage stew, and also her cabbage soup, were minor versions of her stuffed cabbage, and a gift of Grandma's Hungarian heritage.But what Dougie loved most of all was Grandma's simple cooking, the simple everyday things she cooked for him, and his favorite of all meals was hot dogs, sauerkraut and baked beans. With the sauerkraut (cabbage, again) very sour, and the baked beans very sweet, and the hot dogs with mustard (sometimes the hot dogs in buns, sometimes two laid out straight on his plate).A boy could mix the baked beans a little bit with the sauerkraut, or he could wind the strands of the kraut around a bite of hot dog, he could dunk the hot dogs in the baked beans, or most likely he could keep them all very strictly separate, not allowing the juice from the baked beans to spread over to the sauerkraut. Sometimes he did it one way, sometimes another, but rarely exactly the same way. It was a simple meal, but everything complimented each other, and Dougie always loved sour with sweet, which is kind of the way his life always ran, equal mixtures of sour and sweet, sometimes the sweet dominating, and sometimes the sour.The hot dogs were 100% beef, as Grandma and Grandpa did not eat any pork products. The thought of people eating such filthy things as pigs caused both Grandma and Grandpa to go pale, and shake their heads in disbelief (until the dizziness passed). The things people choose to eat, it's amazing, they'd say. But they did eat quite a lot of beef, and chicken, and turkey. They only ate clean meat as God specified, whereas Dada ate no meat at all, all his life long, while Mama ate the same way Grandma and Grandpa Medvee did, and so Dougie grew up hearing the tennis volley back and forth about how eating meat is bad and how eating certain kinds of meat is okay and how eating any meat could lead to cancer and how meat tasted good enough to brave any of the dangers and threats.All family gatherings included vegetarian version of the food, plus the standard carnivore's fare (but of course, all the carnivores ate from the vegetarian trough as well, admitting that Grandma's vegetarian cooking tasted as good as her carnivorous treats).To this day, Dougie grown up into Douglas, still craves hot dogs, sauerkraut, and baked beans -- of course, today, the hot dogs are vegetarian, still with mustard, and they taste every bit as good as the beef kind. But when Papa fixes this meal for his family, he always thinks about his Grandma Medvee, and it is very much like she is sitting at the table with Douglas, Carolena, Bronté, Dirklan, Wolfgang (and someday soon Genevieve!). It is like she is there too, so strong is she alive in her grandson's memory, she is there and she is smiling and she is watching them eat, enjoying every bite they take. All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
important - FIGHT THE FLU WITH HERBS - important
