bandit king of lunch and string

apparently my mom's in the hospital??? trying to get details. freaking out. putting my wheelchair in the back of the car. seebs canceled his work for today, nick's getting ready to go, and i hope to god we're just overreacting and she's fine now. although if she is, we're still going to go see her.

breathe. she'll be ok. i'm no doubt overreacting. breeeeathe.

 

the MRI says mom had a stroke. i’m... processing.

 

mom is back home and recovering. she'll be doing speech therapy etc, but according to our man on the scene she's already doing loads better. i'm so very relieved. my mother is a genuinely wonderful person and i wish she could live 500 years.

i've been watching a lot of emmymadeinjapan videos to keep myself from brooding and fussing. she's so cheery, it's impossible to be too distressed while watching her cook weird recipes, taste them, and make adorable funny faces about them. it's only today i found her videos with her brother tho. i feel i'm psychically bonding with her over having an enormous little brother. :D



i wonder if it's common to have a funny family recipe the kids learn to make? mushy mimi sounds absolutely disgusting, but it also sounds like the kind of disgusting kids would love. @Kodachi do you remember when we'd make 'pac mans' after school? you just cut a radius in a slice of bologna, and when you fry it it opens up so it looks like pac man. the plan was to put the fried bologna in a grilled cheese sandwich but i think usually we just ate it with our fingers.

go one generation farther back, and the recipe is 'stunkage'. that's 'stunk' as in stinky. one of mom's brothers named it that in the hope the others wouldn't want it, so there'd be more for him. it's just campbell's beef barley soup, heated up with no water, then mixed into egg noodles. mom taught me it when i was a bitty jesse, and i still make it today, though i now add a quarter can of water so it's more like thick stew than a gravy and i call it 'stoo noodle'.

i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of families had a two- or three-ingredient 'recipe' the children learn, or even invent, when they're in high single digits. that's the age you start craving to do food science, i think, and if you don't get it knocked out of you -- either by toxic gender roles or by parents refusing to let you use the stove -- i reckon that's when you fall in love with cooking.

 

neat!

 

my mom had a recipe she called 'pseudo-oriental soup' that was shredded chicken, pea pods, and green onions in a light chicken broth with a splash of la choy soy sauce and a pinch of powdered ginger. i say 'had' because she's no longer limited by the pitiful 'oriental' shelf of a 1980's outer suburb grocery. it was one of my favorite comfort foods, though, and very nice when you had the tummy gurgles.

re the term 'oriental', i used to wonder whether chinese supermarkets had an 'occidental' section.