Quiche (April A2Z ~ Misty Memories)

My mom's engagement pic, 1957

Welcome to my April A2Z posts! This time, I am officially signed up on the challenge sheet and will be visiting other bloggers on the list. My theme is "misty memories," which will include a bunch of rambling about old stuff in my life, and hopefully some of it will be accurate, but if not, there's no one around to contradict me. Today we continue with Q for Quiche.

This post is more about my mother. Unlike me, she liked to try new things, especially foods. Supposedly, one of the reasons my father fell in love with her is because she delighted in all the cuisines available in NYC after 20 years of eating the same old boring small-town Ohio farm food. I forget when she said she moved to New York though ~ somewhere in her early 20s, I guess, when a job opportunity arose. She married my dad in 1957 when she was 26. There was no long, complicated engagement or fancy wedding; they met at work at Nationwide Insurance, dated for two months, and he proposed. My dad's philosophy on dating was very simple: find a pretty girl and ask her to lunch. He didn't understand my problems with dating sites or why my relationships had to contain so much drama. I don't understand it either.

From as far back as I can remember, my mom was jumping into the latest food fad. She made her own bread for a while (delicious) and her own ice cream (meh). Any new kitchen gadget that arrived on the scene found its way into our house. In New Jersey, she created blender desserts made with Jell-O, whipped topping, and canned fruit. Not my favorite. She grew vegetables and made zucchini "boats" ~ huge squash halves stuffed with ground beef, tomato sauce, and cheese. Those were great! Zucchini bread was tasty too. Ceviche. Paella. Granola. Next came the quiches. My dad loved those, so Mom experimented with all sorts of different quiche recipes.

Mom returned to work full-time the year after we moved to Illinois ~ she got a job as a claims adjuster in the same insurance company where my father worked as an underwriting manager. Their jobs were in Chicago though, which was a long commute from our suburb 40 miles away in Cary. Since they got home late, during the week our dinners were often casseroles or crockpot concoctions that she had put together earlier. After a while, I started cooking for us and enjoyed it. For years, I liked to cook until after I became an empty nester. It's no fun cooking for one, not to mention there's just as much prep and cleanup. 

I used to enjoy baking as well, and that lasted until a couple years ago when it seemed as though all my friends were on various diets and not eating eggs or sugar or gluten or whatever. It became too hard to cater to the individual preferences, so I gave up. It made me sad to toss all the leftovers, and I didn't want to eat them all myself either. Occasionally, when I was still dating, some man would bitch about how I didn't cook or bake for him. Why didn't he cook or bake for me? I work full-time too. Eventually, I decided I liked my new lifestyle of Not Cooking, Not Baking, and Not Dating so much that I didn't want to switch back for any reason.

The jury is still out on the Not Writing. (When I say "not writing" I mean novels, not posts or poetry.) I am enjoying this recent burst of blog writing… we’ll see how long it lasts this time!