Ambiguous Gastronomics (The Red Menace?!) - by Tim Torkildson

Ambiguous Gastronomics (The Red Menace?!)

by 

Tim Torkildson * 

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My mother was a frugalista from the get-go. Her wary eye, sharpened by a childhood spent surviving the Great Depression in a single-parent family, could spot a bargain from half a mile away.

As the only boy in a family of girls, I was an especial challenge to her -- because she could not fob any hand-me-downs off on me. Although she tried. One winter she hopefully dyed my sister's discarded pink galoshes black, so I could wear them to school. The dye was an inexpensive brand, naturally, and began to peel off on the second day I wore the galoshes. It looked like I was slogging through the snow in a pair of eucalyptus clogs.

She was cheap, but she was not cruel -- so I was excused from further humiliation. She bought me a pair of boy's galoshes -- albeit at a discount store called Arne's Shoe Remainders. They were not the same size, so while the right rubber boot fit snugly over my shoe, the left one would fly off whenever I attempted a brisk trot; I had to slide my left foot along to keep the darn thing on, giving a graphic impression of Igor limping off to the graveyard to dig up a spleen for dinner.

Speaking of dinner: My mother had a nearly diabolical penchant for mixing cheap cuts and/or organ meats with the finer cuts of meat. She discovered that a very small piece of steak could be mixed with a large amount of beef liver, sliced thin, and fried together with some onions -- and no one could tell there was any liver in it! It tasted pretty much like the steak.

This was the basis of her faux beef stroganoff -- a dish she routinely prepared for church potlucks and school picnics. It contained not an ounce of sour cream (have you seen the price of dairy products lately?); instead, she thickened skim milk with corn starch, adding enough red-pepper flakes (which she got for free by heisting a dozen red-pepper packets every time she stopped by Totino's Italian Restaurant to visit with the owner, a friend from high school) to fricassee discerning palates before they could discover the anemic ruse.

Her other dish that qualifies for a Nobel Prize in Ambiguous Gastronomics was chicken livers and gizzards fried in bacon fat and then mixed with stale bread cubes. This made a hideous mash that she turned red with a dash of Red Hawk paprika -- a brand so X that I swear I remember the label reading 'Contains no paprika.' Although it did not taste too bad, it was hard to get past its sluggish appearance. Even my dad disliked its appearance -- and this was a man who liked to dip pretzels in pickle brine. So my mother resorted to bald-faced bribery. She served the dish only on Monday nights, when my dad was desperate to watch 'Gunsmoke' on TV -- she made it quite clear to him that if he ate the Red Menace (as he called it behind her back), he could sit in the living room in his Jockey shorts, drink beer, and watch Matt Dillon dispense rough frontier justice. If he turned up his nose at the dish, the TV would develop reception problems and his mother-in-law would be invited over for the evening, so he had to keep his pants on and his church-key bottle opener in his pants pocket. She also made chocolate pudding that night, which we were not allowed to touch if we did not eat her Red Menace. And she made good chocolate pudding.

As I say, she was frugal, but not heartless. Not with us children, anyways.

The curtains were always halfway shut during the day, to keep sunlight from fading the upholstery; and woe betide anyone, man or child, who turned on a light when entering a room and then forgot to turn it off when departing, even if for only a second. Some Sixth Sense told my mother when such an outrage occurred anywhere in the house, or even the garage, and she would drop whatever she was doing to track the miscreant down and dispense a vigorous piece of her mind.

Bars of soap were used until you needed a magnifying glass to find them in the soap dish. The plastic bleach bottle was repeatedly rinsed out, to get the last bit of bleach out of it for a load of whites.

Until I was 5, I thought my name was 'Do you think it grows on trees?'

On my 8th birthday, I finally got my own bike -- with a paper route attached to it.

You might think such rigorous economizing twisted my youth, turning me into a spendthrift or a fearful miser as an adult. It did neither. I appreciated my mother's attempts to stretch a dollar, and I even adopted her steak/liver trick when I began to raise my own ravenous bambinos, but I refused to kowtow to her slavish devotion to economy. Despite what I've just written here, I know my kids are never going to say to me: "Hey, Dad, remember when you saved 50 cents by making our sandwiches out of bread from the day-old store?" No, if they remember anything, it will be something prodigal -- like ordering pizza on the day I got laid off from work.

Department of Bad Timing!

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* Bulletin Board, St. Paul Pioneer Press, 8/11/13