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Broccoli Cheddar Soufflé

Zola Gorgon on

When holidays came those guys at the halfway house still needed to be fed. They didn’t usually get to go home. So if you think making one turkey dinner is a challenge try doing it twice in one day! My mom and I would get up and get our huge turkey in the oven. Then we’d go to the halfway house and get their smaller one in the oven. We’d make everything they needed for their dinner and get it staged in the kitchen. We’d leave notes on when to take things out or whatever last minute prepping they had to do and we’d be off; back to our house to finish up our dinner. They’d eat their meal late afternoon and we’d have ours at regular dinner time.

Just watching the organizational skills it took to buy the groceries in two different trips was a lesson to learn. She was a master.

My mother was so generous that by the time I was a teenager I learned another very important lesson. She taught me to make my own holiday dates. What I mean by that is in many families there’s this argument about who’s going where on what day and what time. There are fights so many have about which place they are going to eat dinner at. Will it by my mom’s house or your mom’s house? Maybe you’ve heard some of those arguments.

That never happened at our house. For Christmas or Easter in particular, my mom would happily host her holiday dinner either on the weekend before or after the actual holiday date. If Christmas was on Wednesday, she’d have her Christmas dinner the next Saturday. That way there was never an argument. Everyone got to participate in the holiday festivities at both houses. Even now I try to schedule my parties on odd dates that I think the most folks will be available instead of trying to compete for the most popular date.

One lesson I’ll be forever grateful for is the advice she gave me when I moved away from home. She told me to use the good stuff. And then she gave me a lot of her good stuff.

So what’s the good stuff? That’s the glassware, the wine glasses, the fancy plates and the silver. Because we had so many kids we didn’t often use the fancy stuff; especially the glassware. There was just too great a risk a kid would break a delicate glass. On holidays we used it but my mom told me not to be afraid to use the good stuff all the time. She thought it was a shame to leave it in the china cabinet.

 

For holiday dinners she took it one step further. She let me set the table. She took the time to teach me what all the forks were for; all the various sizes. She taught me where to put the knives, forks and all the glasses and taught me what each thing was used for. Then I got to choose what we used and set the table. I have a feeling there were times I put so many knives and forks out at each place setting that we didn’t even have the number of things to eat that required those but she never complained. She let me do my thing.

This prepared me for dinner in fancy restaurants. I had a pretty good idea what spoon to pick up when the soup arrived. I knew what fork was for dessert and which one was for my salad. Those tidbits came in very handy when I began attending business dinners or when a date wanted to take me someplace very special. I was never embarrassed and never felt lost at what to do at the table.

My mother never made a big deal about these lessons. They weren’t things she did in a formal fashion. It’s not like we had table setting learning day. They were just lessons she offered me because she knew I was interested and I have carried them with me always.

My mother taught me one other thing that had little to do with cooking that I wanted to share today. She taught me how powerful you can be while being quiet. My mother was not shy. I’m not saying that. But my mother wielded a lot of power without yelling. My father did the yelling in our family. We didn’t need two doing that.

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