ALMOST AS GOOD AS MOMS

Busy day today, so my thought will not be deep or long.

We where invited over to our daughters for supper. What surprised me was the son-in-law was making the supper. He was busy at the stove stirring and salting as needed. He had walked a chicken through water and everything smelled good. My little lady had made the noodles during the day, and that was our contribution to the meal.

If you haven't figured it out, Chicken & Noodles was the main course with home processed yellow sweetcorn. I state home process, as we did not grow the corn. We purchased the corn at a small charge of $3.00 a dozen during fall harvest. This was done because someone who will remain nameless wanted to. She claims it SO MUCH BETTER then processed canned corn.

So there we are out behind the house, shucking $3.00 corn, just so we can process it ourselves this summer.

Anyway the dinner was good and we all had fun so now on with a story.

Whenever we have home-made noodle's, mom will most likely come up as a topic. We were living out at the chicken ranch at the time and I came home from working in town, and Mom was there. I changed into my barn-grubs and headed down to the barn. When I came back up to the house a few hours later, Chicken and noodles was the planned meal so I cleaned up and waited for it to be ready.

Anyway I don't remember the exact details after this , but somewhere along this time-line, I made a comment out-loud that Ruth was starting to learn how to cook, as the “Chicken & Noodles” tasted “ALMOST AS GOOD AS MOMS”.

Did my sister and brothers know that mom could get MAD REAL QUICK. I wish someone had told me about this trait.

It was 2 hours later before I could hear again.. She tore into me verbally, like a hot knife through cold butter. She made it clear that Dad had said something similar once and she hated those kind of comments. I was informed that my wife put a lot of work into making those noodles and if I didn't like it, she could dump them all into the garbage and I could go hungry.

Mom made it real clear that if I ever made another comment like that again when she was around, she would clean my clock. I looked around for a clock on the wall, just in case my next comment was a winner. The one on the wall looked pretty clean, so I kept my mouth shut as I figured she wasn't thinking about that one.

Anyway over the years, Ruth and I have shared that incident with family and friends. Ruth's “Chicken/Beef and Noodles” ranks right up there, so Mom should be proud. It's nice to see that it is carried on, and that everything doesn't have to come from a zip-locked, prepackaged, hermetically sealed, over the counter, extended shelf-life systems.

It just seems to taste better this way.

Oh by the way, did I tell you about the $3.00 corn.