Today’s “For Better or For Worse” comic strip really hit home with me.
(Recap: John is happy because Ellie is cooking a bunch of food and says it “smells good” and she replies “It’s not for us.”)
It was slightly different in my childhood home. If we came home and Mom was baking, the question we asked was, “Where’s it going?”
Because she never, and I mean never, baked for her own family.
The only home baked goodies we ever got were ‘rusty’ cookies. This is what she called cookies that had gotten slightly burned. Not good enough for her to give anyone, but good enough for us.
(I hope you all are impressed by my surviving this tragedy of Dickensian proportions.)
So… Does “It’s not for us” resonate with you? Did you know what ‘rusty cookies’ were before I explained it above?
We don’t call it rusty cookies, but certainly I’m very familiar with Mom cooking up something yummy that isn’t for the family. It happens to my kids sometimes, though I try to leave a little something behind. And they do not want for home-baked goodies (the kitchen is currently full of pumpkin chocolate chip muffins).
Did you guys ever bake cookies for yourselves? The kids, I mean.
My wife bakes brownies and cupcakes for work semi-regularly. She always makes sure there are some for us. My mother in law recently baked some 160 cupcakes in my house for my wedding. Those were “not for us.” Until the wedding, that is. She did allow chomping on 3 malformed cupcakes.
Ole is on his deathbed. The doctor has told him he has only a few hours to live. He catches the scent of his favorite bars wafting through the air. With all the strength he can muster, he drags himself into the kitchen and sees a fresh pan cooling on the rack. He cuts one out and bites into the scrumptious cookie.
Lena comes in, smacks his hand, and says, “Shame on you, Ole! Dese are for *after *de funeral!”
Yep. Except it wasn’t so much my mom making anything (she wasn’t all that great a cook, cakes from a box and a few cookies were pretty much it when she baked), but buying all kinds of sumptuous, fancy cookies, cakes, candies, etc. for her bridge club. That we were not to touch. And there was rarely anything left over.
Until - o frabjous joy! - the other 3 ladies she regularly played bridge with all moved out of the neighborhood within a few months of each other. And were replaced by 3 (much younger) ladies. And they didn’t want to eat all that stuff - they wanted vegetable trays and fruit. And it took my mom a few tries hosting them to figure it out.
Mom didn’t often bake for the hell of it. She baked for holidays or events, so we’d get to eat the baking eventually. We did get to eat the malformed goodies at the time of baking, and if the batch turned out perfect, we’d sneak one or two of the good ones. Oh, and the best part of being the only kid at home? Dibs on licking the bowl!
When my mom baked it was always with indgredients that she liked and thought we should like to, even with much protesting.
In all my 20 years of living at home she never once made a batch of basic chocolate chip cookies or a basic chocolate cake. It had to be chocolate chip cookies with walnuts in them hard as a rock (how she liked them), or some weird cake with raisins in it.
My ex wife did this and still does it to my children: Extracts great joy from pleasing and giving bake goods to others… as long as they are not family. Sort of rubs their noses in it.
It’s not like my mom was the mega bakester or anything (actually we were rarely allowed sweets) – I mean, sometimes her baking would be a little hippy dippy WTF (wheat germ? carob chips? why mom, why???) but if she did bake, it was for us.
My father also loves to cook for family and for the family to have the best of everything on celebratory occasions.
First of all, excellent username/post combo for the OP.
My wife bakes all the time; I have to ask her to cut back because it’s not good for my waistline. So my kids will never have any complaints, that’s for sure.
Truth is I don’t bake as much as I used it, it’s bad for our waistlines. When my niece was in town, getting a masters degree at the uni, I baked a lot. She loved cake, and I could always send half of whatever I baked home with her. And yes, hubby noticed, once she’d moved away, not so many yummy baked goods!
I make my own pita chips, learned from the catering, and my friends and family all love them. And I often bake up a big bunch to take to a friends cabin, or for someone coming to visit, etc. The Mr loves them too. In fact, he was the reason I started making them, no cholesterol, etc, etc. And usually I make some for us at the same time.
But then Christmas approaches. Since my nieces and nephews are now all grown, edibles have become the norm. But they’ve also spread out all over the continent. So once I start, I make a whole slew of chips, mixed nuts, brownies, etc. Then box them all up and send them off.
More than often it works out that I send off everything I’ve made. So poor man has to smell it all being made, sample when passing through the kitchen (with increasing frequency!), only to discover in the end, there is none in the pantry for him. Usually after I’ve retired, I hear him go in and then…“Hey! What the hell?” It’s hard not to giggle!
My mother was on Weight Watchers, and while she would occasionally fix something yummy for other people, her feeling was that WW was a perfectly healthy diet, and even though all three of us kids were slim to downright skinny, she felt that we should eat the WW diet. We almost never got “normal” food, unless we ate at someone else’s house, or ate out…and we ate out only a few times a year. She’d grill hamburger patties, and then drain the fat from them and put them over the pilot light, so that they were dry and hard as rocks.
She also never bought any food that she, personally, didn’t care for. However, she did feel that everyone should eat liver, because she loved it. If one of us said that we didn’t like a certain food, she’d insist that we eat it anyway. Well, until my brother started complaining about things. He was born 3 months premature, and since my parents thought that he was going to die as an infant, he pretty much got whatever he wanted. It turns out that both my brother and my sister have Crohn’s disease, and I have irritable bowel disease.
My mother was actually a decent cook, but she rarely bothered to take other family members’ tastes into account. If everyone hated liver but her, well, we’d get served liver on a regular basis.
I try to remember this when I plan the family menus. My husband likes meat loaf a great deal more than I do, and my daughter likes chicken much more than I do, but I’m willing to make those dishes. And I don’t insist that everyone eat a big old ham, just because I’m crazy about the stuff.
My mom baked. Not a lot, but enough. It was generally for us. But when I was growing up, I would sometimes come home from school and brownies would be in the oven. I would immediately ask, “Who died?” It became something of a joke in our house. She always made sure that she made brownies for us occasionally, too.
Ha, you want kid torture? Every December, I produce a good 40 pounds of hand-dipped chocolates. Said chocolates are stored in boxes and given to other people. My kids get a few uglies and some for Christmas.
Really, they’re not deprived. And I figure it’s good for their self-control…
Seamus lay on his deathbed, and he smelled the pungent aroma of corned beef and cabbage* wafting up from the kitchen. ‘Wife!’ he called, 'I’d like nothing better than a nice bowl of corned beef and cabbage before I pass. Would you bring me some?
His wife called back, ‘Sure, an’ I can’t do that! I’m saving it for the wake!’
*Yes, yes. I know.
Back when my oven worked, I would bake two batches of whatever I was taking to work/church/other event requiring baked goods, and leave one batch at home for the family. There were a lot more siblings living at home then, so there was always someone willing to eat the baked goods. Now that I no longer have a working oven, and the adults in my house are overweight or have various dietary restrictions, I tend to take salads or drinks to potlucks. I do make sure to leave some at home for my folks, though. My sister, who inherited some of her late mother-in-law’s baking pans, is now the designated baker of my extended family, so there are always pretty decorated cupcakes at family gatherings. Yes, her kids get some too.
I was at my friend’s house and her son was eating baby carrots out of the packege. She yanks them out of his hand and snaps “Those are for stew, go get some chips or something”.
