It wasn’t until I went to college when I learned that not all moms were good cooks. Or that mothers did laundry. Like her mother, my mother worked, but still cooked dinner every night when she got home. Sometimes it was as simple as pork ribs brushed with soy sauce and baked, or shrimp stuffed with seasoned bread crumbs. Although not as ‘fancy’, my favorite were English muffin pizzas we made in the GE toaster oven which called for a spoonful of tomato sauce, a few drips of olive oil, mozzarella, and a dusting of dried oregano.
There likely are people out there that would have a kiniption and race to the internet to send my mother a link to prove that what she was making us wasn’t really pizza. That one had to have a special pizza stone to make authentic pizza, you had to make the dough from scratch and the tomatoes had to be from your garden instead of the can of Hunt’s, which all didn’t really matter anyways because if you didn’t have a wood-fired oven, you didn’t have the right to call it pizza in the first place. But back then, it was just about getting dinner on the table and feeding us. That was all she had to prove.
(The only time I ever had frozen dinners was when my parents went out and left me alone, and I was mesmerized by TV dinners, which were new. I was particularly fond of the one with fried chicken, as well as the roast turkey dinner, where you peeled back the foil from the cobbler midway during baking to crisp it up. My life changed when they introduced boxes of frozen fried chicken, so we bought just that since the stuffing and mashed potatoes were unnecessary accompaniments.)
My mother didn’t cook anything fancy, but it always tasted good. And when I went to college, the first thing I remember is how few guys in my dorm knew how to do their own laundry; their mothers had always done it for them. My mother was no fool, and taught me and my sister how to do all that stuff so she wouldn’t have to do it all herself.
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