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Scrubbing potatoes
Posted On 03/02/2015 05:02:13 by dabbymac

For the first 18 years of my life, we lived a 16 family apartment building in Brooklyn, NY.  Our apartment was two bedrooms but quite spacious as were most pre-war buildings.  My only sister was 11+ years older than me.  I was a mid-life surprise child or what was known as a change-of-life baby.  

One of the great disadvantages of having older birth parents is you lose them when you are quite young.  My mom passed when I was 15.  My mom's vocation was housewife.  I lived in a spotlessly clean home with a place for everything and everything in its place.  I ate wonderful meals that always seemed to take all day to prepare.  My mother lost her father young and as the oldest female raising her 5 brothers and sisters fell to her while her mom went to work.  My mom was determined that fate would not befall my sister or me.  Therefore...we had no chores.  I didn't make my own bed, wash the dishes, help with the dusting and my idea of vacuuming was to sit on the tophat vac while mom pushed it around. My jobs were to eat, sleep, play and study.  I was really good at the first three.

Suddenly, Mom was gone and I had to pitch in.  My sister was married and had a little girl by then, however she had moved home while her husband was stationed overseas.  He was in Germany when the Berlin Wall went up.  Because of the conflict, military families could not join their loved ones. My sister was an RN and worked full time.  Keeping house fell to me.  Uh oh!  I figured most of it out. Fortunately putting things where they belonged was a habit ingrained in all of us, so the house was never unkempt.  

My biggest challenge was cooking.  My dad would leave the night's menu with me in the morning and I would purchase the food after school.  For a few months I would come home, call my best friend's house and ask her mom what to do with the food.  Mrs. Morgan would explain with infinite patience and then call to check on me.  During one of those first phone calls Mrs. M told me to "scrub the potatoes".  My mom used the word "scrub" when she used harsh chemicals.  She "scrubbed" the floor, she "scrubbed the tub, she "scrubbed" the sink.  So I "scrubbed" the potatoes with the product of the day ... Babo.  Babo was the Ajax or Comet of the early 60's.  My sister came home from work early one day while I was prepping dinner.  She stood aghast watching me pour scrubbing cleanser on potatoes.  She was yellling like a banshee about how I was going to poison the family.  Since we were about 6 months into my cooking I explained no one had gotten sick yet!  I guess I was good at rinsing. My sister told my father in her best outraged voice about the potatoes.  My father laughed until he cried.  He could barely catch his breath.  His response was simple..."If you can do it better...you wash the potatoes."  

The family ate a lot of pretty awful food during the learning curve.  They never complained.  My cooking improved and they actually began to enjoy meals again.  I experimented with matchbook cover recipes, got new recipes from my friends' moms and eventually there was a new normal. I learned the difference between "wash" and "scrub" and stopped using Babo on the potatoes. It's a good thing big Sis never found out what I thought "blanch the vegetables" meant!  Yikes!



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Viewing 1 - 1 out of 1 Comments

03/02/2015 10:39:58

I knew blanch meant to whiten...so I used Clorox Bleach...fortunately extremely diluted.  Just FYI, bleach can be added in a nominal amount to purify drinking water.  Fortunately, the potato scrubbing episode alerted me to the fact I might have one or two things wrong.  I have another story about Clorox, but we'll save that for another day.





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