Another Grandmother Story

 I mentioned recently that I was a lucky kid: I had all four of my grandparents.

And for several years.

When one of my grandfathers did die, his wife, my mother's mother, my grandmother, came to live with us.

If you've ever visited my web site and gone to the food and recipes section you will find among the recipes several from this grandmother.

She made the best toasted cheese sandwiches in the world; I hated toasted cheese sandwiches until she cajoled me into trying one of hers.

Somehow she got crisp bacon to stick to the outside of the toasted bread; in conjunction with perfectly melted cheese and perfectly toasted bread it was a perfectly delicious concoction.

One time we decided to make popcorn balls.

I don't think she had ever made popcorn balls, or had the faintest idea of how to make them; I know I had no idea; but she was pretty sure we could do it.

So we found a recipe for caramel apples in the Betty Crocker Cookbook and popped some corn and made caramel popcorn balls.

Once the caramel was created the rest was pretty obvious: pop enough corn to make a massive gooey mass of caramelized corn and scoop up handfuls and make balls; the only problem was that the caramel was kinda hot; but we worked around that.

Those popcorn balls became staples for my grandmother and me and my friends; we made them often.

A lot of the things she and I did involved standing in front of the sink - things like doing the dishes.

One time we were standing in front of the sink peeling potatoes.

I was flailing away with my peeler joyously flinging peels hither and yon.

I thought that that was how you peeled potatoes; the flinging was fun and that made it play, not work, not that any task performed in tandem with my grandmother was really work.

Apparently my grandmother didn't see the fun in flinging potato peels into the sink and onto the counters and sticking them onto the back splash.

Suddenly she turned to me and said "For the love of god, Noelie (she called me Noelie) you're spreading peels around like a wild woman's crap".

She had a lot of colorful ways of framing things.