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CHOCOLATE PUDDING ON THE CEILING
by C.L. Halvorson
Delighted as we were with the scrambled
eggs and toast Daddy made us the morning we found out our mother would
not die, we soon discovered his repertoire of dishes was rather small.
One of the few other recipes in Daddy’s file was chili. Daddy made a
mean chili con carne. It was the best chili I had ever had, and still
is to this day. Yet after ten days in a row of scrambled eggs, toast
and chili we really needed a little more variety.
Mama was an excellent cook. She even
won awards for it in her younger days. The only thing was we very
rarely, in our opinion, had “fun” food. Nearly meal was wholesome to
the last bite. Liver and onions, baked chicken, meatloaf every
Wednesday. She also served odd vegetables that she insisted we at least
try before rejecting out of hand.
Every Friday night, grocery shopping
night, we got to have TV dinners or fish sticks. We loved TV dinners.
I still do. This was the limit of our “fun” food for the most part.
Daddy, of course, had no hope of competing with Mama’s dinners. We ate
some take away the first couple of weeks, but that soon got very
expensive. It was time for Daddy tackle a new skill. Grocery shopping.
By the time we got home from school that
day, Daddy had returned from his little excursion to the supermarket.
He was unloading the paper sacks when we walked in. Our jaws dropped to
our chests in amazement! As our eyes traveled over his purchases we
became more and more dumbfounded. There were cookies, ice cream,
pudding mixes, two boxes of fish sticks and frozen French fries!
Oh, look over there! Chips! Half a dozen different kinds to choose
from! There were corn dogs, hot dogs, gasp, Twinkies!
Five different types of lunch meat, not
just bologna, and the good peanut butter! We froze in disbelief as we
cast our eyes upon the most wondrous thing of all. Soda pop. We were never allowed soda pop more than once or twice a year at the
pizza parlor. It was always milk with breakfast and lunch. Kool-aid
for dinner and in between you had a choice of water or thirst. But
there sat no less than six varieties. Daddy looked at our stunned
faces.
“Well girls, what do you think? Think
we can eat this stuff?” We nodded in unison, still numb.
“Is the soda pop for us, too?” Diana
squeaked.
“You bet! Y’all want some right now?”
The cheers broke out singing praises to Daddy! We threw our arms around
him and pledged our undying love. He chuckled to himself as he took out
three glasses and filled them with ice. Ice? We never, never, ever got ice! He filled each glass with the soda of our choice and sat them
on the table where we drank them slowly lest we wake from this beautiful
dream.
Sara gets tickled when she tells other
people that we were not allowed to have ice in our drinks as kids.
They nearly always tell her we were truly deprived if we weren’t even
allowed ice. Of course, she leaves out the reason why. We couldn’t
have ice because we always got the entire bucket dirty from digging
around and we never refilled the trays. But I digress. Where was I?
Oh, yes. Soda pop.
As we sat there at the table, savoring
our good fortune in spite of recent events, Daddy put the groceries away
and began dinner preparations. He was washing and cutting lettuce,
tomatoes, onions, and the like. After a time, he came out of the
kitchen and placed a tray with the sliced veggies and a loaf of bread on
the table. Back to the kitchen where he retrieved another platter
loaded with several different kinds of cold cuts and sliced cheeses and
a stack of paper plates. Mama always said paper plates were a waste of
money. Wow! We were living the high life!
“Now,” Daddy announced as he laid the
rest of the items on the table. “I’m going to teach you girls how to
make a real sandwich. Not those dinky little ones that y’all and
your mother eat with just one piece of meat, maybe a slice of cheese and
some mustard and mayo. No! That’s not a real sandwich.”
He removed two slices of bread from the
now open loaf. He slathered one with mustard, the other with
mayonnaise. From the meat and cheese platter he chose a slice of
bologna, a slice of ham and a slice of salami. To this he added a slice
of both Swiss and American. As if that were not enough, he topped this
with lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle. He capped it all with the other
slice of bread. He held it up in one hand for us to see. It was
beautiful! He reverently placed it on a paper plate to which he added a
handful of potato chips and a glass of Coca Cola.
“Dig in,” he mumbled through a mouth
full of sandwich.
We eagerly made ourselves a sandwich
just like his, complete with a side of chips and soda pop. It was
delicious! We were stuffed like a tick by the time we were done. We
couldn’t possibly eat another bite.
“We wants desert?” Daddy asked.
“I do” we answered. Well, maybe just one more
little bite.
“How about chocolate pudding?”
“Yeah!”
Daddy and I cleared the table while Sara
and Diana sat on stools at the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen
from the dining room. With everything cleared away he began to gather
what he needed to make the pudding mix. A large mixing bowl, milk,
pudding mix and the mixer. Where was the mixer?
“Where does Mama keep the mixer?” he
asked us.
We didn’t know where she kept it. For
some reason, Mama never liked other people in her kitchen. Daddy
searched for a while but could not find the mixer no matter where he
looked. But he did find the blender. He removed it from the cupboard
and placed it on the counter.
“This will work. It’s pretty much the
same thing,” he said.
We were quickly discovering our father
was a brilliant man. Not only did he know the perfect foods to buy and
how to make a real sandwich but he was also resourceful. We
would have never thought of using a blender in place of a mixer. Into
the blender went the milk then the pudding mix. The directions on the
box said to blend on high for one minute. Daddy surmised that since a
blender was much quicker than a mixer it would probably only take thirty
seconds or so on high. He plugged it into the outlet, put the lid on
the blender and hit number ten, the blender’s highest speed.
Obviously, this was the first time Daddy
had ever used a blender. That or it had been a while since he had used
one. He forgot to make sure the lid was on securely and he failed to
hold the lid in place as an added precaution. The resulting explosion
covered not only Daddy, my sisters and me with chocolate pudding, it
blanketed the kitchen as well. We collectively decided that maybe we
didn’t need desert after all and helped Daddy clean the kitchen.
When Mama finally did get out of the
hospital one of the first questions she asked was, “What is that all
over the ceiling in the kitchen?”
“Chocolate pudding,” came the reply.
“How in the world did y’all get
chocolate pudding on the ceiling?” |
