MOM’S COOKING
Mothers’ recipes from greens to muffins
When I was a young single mother living in South Louisiana, I found myself and my two little girls sitting in the back of a Catholic church on Sunday.
I was a little worried about being noticed. The evangelical Baptist church whose threshold I had faithfully and frequently crossed as a young wife had been a sanctuary for my daughters and me, a safe place where people knew us, seemed concerned, offered prayers.
However, when our family fractured, I learned that for that congregation, being in a bad marriage was acceptable and leaving one was not. I found myself unwanted and unwelcome and unable to explain to my daughters why we wouldn’t be returning.
We needed a church home. We needed a community. We needed the ritual of worship to make us feel safe. Those needs eclipsed the shame of divorce. The local Catholic church let us through the doors, so we could often timidly sneak in just as the organ warmed up in order to avoid any awkward questions. We sat in the very back pew. The girls made a few friends
that day, and I rejoiced at findi ng out that Cat holics and Bap-
tists shared a few common hymns. No one asked any of the things I feared.
I was a single mother with two little girls and two jobs, attending college full time. Well-meaning people often gave that unsolicited advice that I should give up my dreams of a degree, drop out of college and return to retail or whatever industry would take me, but this church welcomed families like mine and offered support programs, including a food pantry, to ease the day-to-day struggles.
I had sweet little mouths to feed, and I wanted to set an example for them to set their eyes on their chosen prize and never look back. That meant using the resources available to me, without self-reproach.
As such, a visit to the food pantry became a bit of an event for the three of us. We were not allowed to actually “shop” the pantry, but the volunteers were generous, and we were sent home with grocery bags full of surprises.
Mostly, they were great surprises. Deviled ham! Crunchy peanut butter! Apple juice! We unpacked the groceries with fanfare. We sang and danced and laughed and stocked our empty shelves. If we scored a snack, we’d splurge and enjoy a little in celebration as we inventoried that week’s food.
But with the surprises came some culinary challenges. We learned that powdered milk could be stretched with whole milk and that canned lima beans are better with rice and diced luncheon meat. Almost anything tastes better with a single strip of bacon crumbled into it, and Hamburger Helper could be cooked without hamburger at all. I can almost hear their squeals of laughter over the new name they gave it: “Hominy Helper.”
Occasionally, we’d be graced with a surprise that we didn’t cotton to and that we couldn’t disguise enough to eat. Canned turnip greens were one of those surprises.
It seemed ungracious to me to express displeasure with this charity in any way. I didn’t like canned blackeyed peas, but I turned them into an edible hummuslike dip before I’d ever even heard of hummus. I wanted to set a good example to encourage my children to be the vegetable eaters that I was not, truth be told.
It had worked. The girls ate things that I never knew I’d eat. They actually liked fresh spinach. They requested stewed eggplant. They craved cabbage stewed, boiled, shredded — any way they could eat it. They’d even been the first to try my stewed radish greens.
Unfortunately, where those turnip greens were concerned, I hadn’t set a good example. I’d never liked canned greens, and the girls knew it. I wouldn’t make them eat anything I wouldn’t eat myself, either, so those canned turnip greens presented a conundrum. Within days, I found a solution.
My youngest’s preschool was holding its annual food drive just as our surplus of canned greens arrived. (To us, even one can of canned greens was a surplus.) I taped her name, which she had scratched semi-legibly on a bright yellow construction paper circle, to the bottom of those turnip greens and felt not so bad about sharing our pantry’s gain with someone who might enjoy them more. Or at all. The little one was so proud to contribute to the food drive, too. If felt like we’d done the honorable thing.
Weeks later, when the cupboards became bare again and the date of our scheduled visit, circled in pink on the calendar, arrived, we set out for the food pantry and came home with full bags. We danced and sang about the kitchen, again, as we filled the shelves. We inspected each item. We rejoiced over pudding. We were delighted by peaches and plums and pears and a can of fruit cocktail. We counted our blessings, one can of tuna at a time.
And down at the bottom of the bag of cans, imagine our surprise to find a darned can of turnip greens! A can of turnip greens with a bright yellow construction paper circle taped to its bottom. A can of turnip greens with my daughter’s name on it. The can of turnip greens that had found its way back to us like a runaway pup. Our newest project — turnip greens.
The girls and I would learn how to disguise the less palatable canned greens by straining them well and tucking them into scrambled eggs with “government cheese” that occasionally came through the food pantry, and we’d pat ourselves on the backs and flex our muscles like Popeye at the table for managing to eat them. Buoyed with culinary confidence, we’d then tackle the surplus fresh greens from our neighbor’s backyard garden, and it’s there that we really came into our own.
We learned that the best greens were the freshest, cooked low and slow, flavored with elements of smoke, sweet, sour, salt and spice. It was our formula. On Sundays, we ate them after church with homemade cornbread. I still fix them this way today.