Although my wife is a great cook, I notice that she is no longer real eager to attempt things, like pigs in the blanket, that take awhile to make from scratch. This year I got really hungry for those cabbage rolls so I decided to make them myself. It took some effort. First you have to boil or steam a head of cabbage in order to get the leaves to peel off in one piece. Even then it was quite a job to get them off intact and I hadn't looked real close when I bought this ginormous head of cabbage so I missed the fact that the first six or eight leaves had holes in them because the harvester or the supermarket produce guy had made a big slice in the head. That made it even trickier to get the leaves off in decent shape. While the leaves are steaming you have to get the filling ready. That means making some rice (easy) and letting it cool. While that's going on you also have to dice up some onion and bacon and saute them until the bacon is crisp. Then you mix ground beef and pork together (Mom's recipe calls for meatloaf mix, which you could get at the local supermarket when I was a kid, but they don't have that where I live), add the rice, onions and bacon (drained) and squish all that together with a bit of salt and pepper. After that you put some of the mixture in each cabbage leaf (which you have already painstakingly peeled off the head of cabbage, trimmed out the tough central rib and cut into pieces that are more or less square, or at least rectangular) and then roll them like little burritos before laying them on top of a bed of sauerkraut that you have previously prepared in a baking dish. Usually you have to hold them closed with toothpicks. At least I had to. I think Mom did that too, but I'm not sure. If you are really skilled at all this, like Mom was and my wife is, you get nice uniform little rolls that sort of look like egg rolls or dolmas on steroids. If you are unskilled, like me, you get something like this:
Not real uniform, but sort of folk artish. In any case all that's left to do is to cover the baking dish with tinfoil and bake those little piggies in the oven for two hours at 350 degrees. Oh, I forgot: you have to preheat the oven before shoving them in there. Oh, and also, you have to wash out the hundred and forty-seven bowls, knives, spatulas, frying pans and other implements you have used to make them if, like me, you didn't realize that your wife has a dutch oven that could have been used to do the sauteing on top of the stove and baking inside the oven as well.
This was a three-beer-recovery project. While I was sucking down my second Guinness in front of the Texas-California game in the recovery room my head began to clear and I realized why Mom, and my wife, stopped making pigs in the blanket and why Mom stopped doing the baking as well. It is a heck of a lot of work to make that stuff from scratch. I don't know how the hell Mom and my wife got through all that every December because neither of them ever was a drinker.
By the third beer I started thinking about some of the other things that my parents and/or parents-in-law did that used to make my wife and me shake our heads but we find ourselves doing now. For instance, my mother-in-law and father-in-law used to carry paper towels in their pockets and use them to open and close doors. They would NOT touch a single doorknob. Weird, right? I used to think that; but now my wife and I always carry a bottle of generic Germ-Ex in our pockets and practically wear out the outer layer of skin on our hands un-germifying them whenever we touch doorknobs or menus, pump gas at the local Quickie-Pickie or do anything else that requires our sensitive epidermis to come into contact with anything but air. Sometimes we use it just because we've walked through an area that makes our skin crawl, even if we haven't touched anything. I don't even want to tell you what we do when we are faced with eating finger foods while reading a library book.
And a corollary to the paper towel/Germ-Ex business is the silverware on the table thing. My inlaws would never put their silverware (or plasticware or whateverware) on the table at a restaurant. They would unwrap it from the napkin and then hold it up with the butt ends about a quarter of an inch from the table until their plate came and they could put the silverware there. This used to annoy my wife so much that one time when we were out with her parents and her mother did the silverware totem pole thing, my wife took the utensils out of her mom's hands and rubbed them all over the table. As soon as the food arrived her mother asked for a new set of silverware. Of course, here we are twenty-five years later and do we let our silverware touch the table in a restaurant? Nooooo!
The silverware quirk wasn't the only food-related idiosyncrasy our parents had. My mom washed eggs before she cracked them. And my mother-in-law always threw away the ends of a banana. When my wife and I were young we were never worried about germs on eggs or anything else for that matter. Nor did we worry about something wicked hiding in the end of a banana. Of course now we get it. I did mention the Germ-Ex thing didn't I?
Then there was the window blind routine. My mom had this habit of closing the blinds as soon as the sun started to sink. In fact, in later life it seemed as though she started closing them by mid-afternoon. My wife and I used to get a laugh at that. Until recently anyway. Now I find myself closing the blinds as soon as the sun starts to get a peek at the western horizon. Hey, I don't want to be on display. Not that anyone would want to see in the house, but I'm just sayin'.
As we age my wife and I find ourselves doing more and more of the things that made us shake our heads when our parents did them. I guess it's just part of aging. Or maybe just plain common sense. I know my Mom would agree with that.
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