Egg Juice

You offered me your leftover “egg juice” long after I had finished my breakfast, half a bagel and one soft boiled egg.  It was cold by now and I had nothing left to soak the juice up with.  Once again, I asked you,

“Why is it that I can ration an egg perfectly so that each bite of bread has an equal amount of yolk so that there is nothing left of either when I am finished?”

It is the question I have posed to you our entire marriage.  You and our boys who learned from you this wasteful habit, eat cereal with milk and when you are finished, there is a bowlful of milk left.  I have asked my son the same question of “why do you leave so much milk behind?” and he will answer by filling the bowl with cereal again and when it is gone, there is still a bowlful of milk left.  It’s like they just needed a “dusting” of milk on the cereal in order to eat it.  I wonder why the three of them don’t just eat a dry bowl of cereal and then finish it off with a glassful of milk.  You see, I have a problem with wasting food.

My older son will always leave one last bite on his plate.  For the life of me, I have never been able to figure that one out. Maybe it has to do with avoiding starvation in my own family as we were growing up. 

Yum!  Miss you Grams!

By no means were we poor or in need of rationing food.  My father was a large German/Czech man, brought up in a family that loved to eat and drink copious amounts of food and liquor.  My paternal grandmother was a great cook.  There were homemade spaeztle and rich roasts with loads of thick gravies and butter-laden cakes and her famous kolachky cookies that are a requirement in our house every Christmas.  Grams was a robust woman and her men never left the table hungry.

our fave - Kolacky cookies!

It just so happened that my mother was not fond of eating, didn’t like food and was very cheap.  When you don’t like to eat, you impose it on your family, I suppose.  And she was happier stashing her money away in her favorite hiding places than in feeding her family.

For a while she felt it was more important to feed my father than us.  So he would get the large servings of meat and the rest of us would divvy up a small piece that was cut from dads.  We learned early on that no matter how bad it tasted, this was it for the meal, so you’d better lick your plate clean or go hungry.

She would make some of dad’s favorites so we would get stuck eating liver or fried smelts.  It didn’t matter that we had said time and time again that we hated these foods. 

“Like it or leave it” she would reply.  Unfortunately, as with liver dinners, which anyone who has delighted in this meal knows, it requires loads of sautéed onions and bacon, lots of bacon.

Bacon was a treat, more expensive than the liver, and therefore, had to last a couple of meals.  Mind you there were six in our household.  So she would make dad three pieces of bacon and each of us would get half a strip to go with the liver.  She did not like onions so there were no fried onions along side the bacon.

Imagine trying to match up every piece of liver on the fork with a piece of bacon.  It was more like bacon flavoring.  This is where I learned to apportion so that icky food was matched with tasty food in order to make it palatable.  It was not only icky stuff like liver, sardines or fried smelts that I learned to make palatable.  It was mostly my mother’s cooking.  Since she didn’t care for food, this making her care less about cooking it, she put no effort forth in making sure her meals were palatable.  Therefore, items you couldn’t really mess up (even though she came close), like mashed potatoes or applesauce, were rationed on the plate so each terrible bite was masked with something, anything with flavor.

And since food rationing was practiced in our household (remember, we were not poor, my mother was just cheap), us kids were forced to eat every bit or we would go hungry.  Of course, this practice lasted only long enough for me to learn how to cook.  After that, not one morsel of food cooked by my mother ever touched my lips again.  Even my father learned gourmet cooking in order to satiate his appetite.  Unfortunately, his cooking was wasted on my mother and he soon gave it up.

While there is no need for this practice in our house anymore, as food preparation is an art and flavorful meals are expected and received, you can’t fight those long ago learned survival skills.  My plate is always clean when I finish a meal.  I am an expert in portion management.  There are equal amounts of starches to a meat counterpart or milk to cereal.

So when I watched my husband throw away his “egg juice” this morning, I cringed a bit.  Had he mentioned it a bit earlier, while I still had bread for dipping, I would have appropriated a piece for this “juice.”  It won’t get by me again.  But I still don’t have an answer for the copious amounts of milk left over from my boys’ cereal bowls.  Suggestions are welcome.  As I heard so many years ago, “there are starving children in China, you know….”