Looking forward to getting back into the kitchen again

​        For the last several months, my lovely bride, Debbie, has been taking care of me. I’m blessed to have a wife who has stepped up and taken care of things. 
          She’s also been doing a great job cooking and doing the dishes. Both jobs that I normally would do. 
        I prefer being in the kitchen and doing the grocery shopping and she prefers shoveling snow, working with the animals and being outside.
          For weeks, I’ve been requesting baked chicken and mashed potatoes. 
          Finally, the other day, I got my wish.
          I sat in my lazy chair, peeled the potatoes, and chopped them up and Debbie did the rest.
          Boy, those potatoes were good. And the meal was delicious.           
          It’s hard to beat Dayton’s smoked, baked chicken. All you have to do is pop it in the oven and heat it up.
          I admit, I’m looking forward to getting back on my feet full time and back into the kitchen.
          I love to cook and have been doing it for many years.
        Back in the day, I used to invite friends over for grilled pork chops, mashed potatoes, green beans and mushrooms and French bread all served with iced cold tea.
          Those were some great memories.
          I attribute my cooking skills to my mom. She was a great cook as was my grandmother. Grandma Horton could throw together a meal for a dozen people in less time than it takes some people to drive across town. She cooked in nursing homes and schools. With seven kids, she spent a lot of time at the stove. 
          I remember going to my grandparents’ house and helping pluck chickens. I did not like that task at all. I would stand in the kitchen and watch my grandmother clean and prepare a chicken for a later meal in record time.  
          My mom was a great cook, too. I always enjoyed her cooking but never cared for her dressing. 
         I was probably about age seven when I asked my mom if she would cook me a turkey for Thanksgiving. So, she baked a turkey, made mashed potatoes and gravy along with a pan of dressing. For whatever reason, I did not care for her dressing. But I was required to eat it. I had to sit at the kitchen table with what seemed like a heaping pile of dressing. 
          I think it took me at least two hours to finish it.
        I never asked for dressing again. In fact, I enjoyed the dressing at school more than I liked my mom’s dressing.
         Outside of the dressing, there was always plenty of good food and I never went hungry. 
         My mom would get the Sunday paper. And she would spend several hours going through it and clipping out coupons. She had a billfold in her purse where she’d house all her coupons. Her Saturday shopping excursions were much more detailed than what Debbie and I do today. Often times, when shopping on Saturdays, Mom and I (and eventually my brother, Tom) would visit seven or eight grocery stores where she would religiously use her coupons to save money. She also collected S&H green stamps. She would take the booklets of stamps to the S&H green stamp store in Tulsa where she would purchase various merchandise. She also purchased dinnerware from another local grocery store using points she’d collected from the purchase of groceries.
          On my dad’s side of the family, my grandmother passed away before I was born. So, I remember many times going to visit my great-grandmother when she lived in Bartlesville, Okla. and later in Barnsdall, Okla.  
         One of my favorite things to eat at her house was her “homemade” biscuits. It was several years later when the family let me in on the secret. All those years, I had been eating canned biscuits!
           I’d love to find my mom’s homemade biscuit recipe. She made the best biscuits and coleslaw. And it was hard to beat her deviled eggs.
         Meals these days aren’t as elaborate as they were when I was younger. But I’m looking forward to getting back into the kitchen and fixing baked chicken, pork chops, mashed potatoes and all my favorite meals.
           Debbie is looking forward to that, too.
           Good things are happening, every day and always!