My brother Steven and I spent a lot of time together as kids. We also spent a lot of time alone together. Our parents worked very long hours, most times they left before the sun came up and came home from work after the sun had gone down.
We learned to be very self reliant people.We also learned a resourcefulness far exceeding normal children. We knew how to cook, we knew how to do laundry and clean the house. We could make real meals, too, not that garbage that comes in boxes these days, we made actual meals that required measuring and more than one skillet. We were wives to our parents. Many times I felt like we really got the shaft on our childhood. Looking back now however, I see that we were really blessed. It has made us stronger people, more self sufficient.
But we were still kids, and if a child does not have a parent to whine "I'm boooreeedddd" to, they will skip the whine, and head right for the cure. Mischief. Shenanigans. Tom Foolery. Ballyhoo. Whatever you want to call it, we raised it, got into it, made a mockery of it and in general had a ball with it.
One favorite pastime was creating things in the kitchen. I was raised in the day of those brand new 'micro wave' things. We were so lucky, we got one, and it was wonderful to play with.We experimented with different things in the microwave, seeing how long it takes for something to blow. Eggs take a little longer than you'd think, but when they blow-- they really blow. We managed to get one out before it blew once... It sat on its end, upright. It looked like a weeble wobble man. We drew a face on him. We decided to give him a hat. After much debate, we decided that he was a Mexican egg, so he needed a sombrero, we reasoned.
Being the resourceful children that we were, we already knew what we needed to make him a sombrero. We learned that lesson the week before, when we had "meat in the microwave" experiments. We needed summer sausage.
Thinly sliced round summer sausage luncheon meat will rise in the center. The outer edges will harden, and there you have it, a sombrero. We were so pleased with our creation that we decided to cook Jose a bit more.Mexican eggs with sombreros make a very bad smell when they are overcooked. The poor guy never really stood a chance, and we ended his time by scraping him off the ceiling of the new appliance with a spatula.
We did not limit our experimentation to the microwave however. We were, after all, seasoned chefs who cooked for our parents on numerous occasions. We decided one day to make a nice pasta salad. We had seen the bright rainbow rotini noodles in the grocery store before, but could never convince our mother to buy any. We decided one day to make our own.
There are 4 burners on a stove. There are 4 colors of food coloring in the kit in the cupboard. Coincidence? I think not.We fired up all 4 burners, and placed saucepans of water on each. Just as they were all reaching a rolling boil, we added noodles. And food coloring. Red, blue, green and yellow. I thought the yellow might be a bit redundant, and as it turns out, I was right, but what the hell, 4 pots, 4 colors, right? We used simple elbow macaroni, we were not fancy folk, we ate simple noodles. No one ate noodles THAT day, but in general, on normal days, we ate simple noodles, elbows or spaghetti noodles.
I should mention at this point that we had a family dog, a Benji-on-steroids looking mutt. Her name was Smokey. Quite often she was involved in our adventures, or at the very least was the start of some very good side aching laughs. Smokey was a member of the family. Smokey was with us in the kitchen on Menoodle day. In hindsight, I bet she wished she had just walked away, I know I did.
Steven decided partway into the noodle fest that our 'salad' would be called Menoodles, a sort of play on the original boy band "Menudo"... I should have known then that my brother was gay.
We got out the big bowl, the kind that every Midwestern woman with her own kitchen owns. The majority of those are made by Tupperware, of course. This was the potato salad bowl, and the monster cookie batter bowl. It might be big enough for our Menoodles, we thought. We drained and rinsed each color in turn, with the appropriate "Ohh, Ahhh" to signify our awe at the lovely colors we had created. We did not however notice how long the Menoodles had been cooking. We were very concerned with the colors being deep enough, showing up enough. Our menoodles had turned to mush, they were incredibly over cooked. We each tasted 2 noodles, a sample of each color, as if they might taste different from each other just by virtue of being boiled in different colored water. It was truly the worst thing I have ever eaten.
We decided that Menoodle salad should just disappear. The parents were due home soon, and we needed to get rid of the evidence. We were no longer great chefs preparing a wonderful and visually stunning dinner, suddenly we were reduced to kids who had wasted a 2 pound box of elbow macaroni and and entire kit of food coloring. We decided that Smokey could help. She was, after all, a member of the family. Surely she would be happy to take one for the team, eat the evidence. We set the bowl down on the kitchen floor. Smokey approached it, tail wagging, thanking us for sharing our wonderful people food with her. She got up to that bowl, took one whiff, and high tailed it out of there. I was rather insulted. She who licks her own rectum would not eat our creation. That hurt. And caused a bit of panic.
We could not dump the noodles in the garbage, they would be discovered. We had to get them out of the house. Did I mention that it was winter? Snow everywhere. We walked down the path in the yard leading to the horse barns, each clutching a side of the Tupperware bowl. We trudged through snow up to our knees. We didn't make it far, it was cold, windy and we had to hurry. We did a heave-ho off to one side, and tried to cover the pile of color with some snow from the path we had created.
One lesson to be learned here: Room temperature noodles will melt any snow placed over them, but will not melt sufficiently the snow on which they lay. Not enough to sink all the way down to the ground below anyway. We found this out less than an hour later, as we trudged down that path again, with our parents this time, to do our chores at the barn.
Even in the coming darkness of winter, my parents could see the neon noodles against the pure white snow. There was no time to confer and come up with another dog in the road whopper. We were busted by hot neon Menoodles. The truth had no choice but to come out. Steven and I both took one for the team that night. Smokey slept the peaceful sleep of a traitor. A traitor who did not have a Menoodle induced stomach ache though. I don't blame her really, I mean, we sure as hell weren't going to eat it, and yet we expected her to?
Kids can be cruel.
