Growing up, we called it hamburger and rice. Hamburger browned in a skillet. Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice made according to the directions on the box. The two ingredients are mixed together and served with salt, pepper, margarine, and a squeezable plastic lemon full of concentrated juice.
My dad grew up impoverished and hamburger and rice, often without lemon, was a staple. Once he became a private in the Marine Corps, the meal became standard end-of-the-month fare. We continued to have it throughout my childhood and early adulthood.
When I left home, I continued to make it. It’s a favorite.
Don’t even think about feeding me a beet. It’s not going to happen.
Tom Robbins is a favorite author of mine. Tom thought highly of beets. Let me just quote him for a moment:
The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…
So did my father, I think. Although I don’t remember ever seeing him eat a beet before that fateful summer. He may have initially planted them for my mother who liked pickled beets. Which are, arguably, the worst of all the beets.
I realize some people will think this is heresy, but the best grilled cheese sandwiches are made with Velveeta. Yes, I know. Not real cheese. Get over it. It makes a creamy, melty, cheesy, drippy, greasy mouth of complete goodness. Complete. Perfect. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. I’m talking about grilled cheese perfection.
A Velveeta grilled cheese requires Nature’s Own Whole Wheat Bread – yeah, the cheap sandwich stuff and tons of real butter. Slathered sweeps of it across the bread and a goodly amount in a hot cast iron pan.
If the pan is at the right temperature, the sandwich has a light crust that crunches when you bite into it releasing the ooey, gooey melty magnificent faux cheese. I’m telling you. It’s all about proportions.
I had a cheese slicer which I used to make grilled cheese from the original rectangular block. Two slices. One is to fill up the top left side of the bread, the second cut in half so that there is a strip down the right side and another across the bottom of the bread. Perfection.
The cheese slicer broke after a mere 40 years of use. I was incensed. I can’t find one that cuts to the right thickness. I realize they’re adjustable, but evidently, I’m challenged. I can’t get it right. So. I’ve taken to buying the extra-thick Velveeta slices. I do have to admit, it’s more convenient if an environmental disaster. However, the proportion of cheese to bread is just slightly off. One slice is not enough. Two is a tad too much. I always go for too much, with a grilled cheese, with everything in life. And is my favorite word. I am a maximalist, not a minimalist.
Step One: Using the lid of the turkey roasting pan that you lusted after for years and you finally inherited from your dad – the lid that is never used in turkey roasting because the pan never was tall enough to hold a 20lb turkey with it on — pour the two bags of the seasoned bread cubes you bought at the Kroger — Pepperidge Farm Sage & Onion, because you can’t find Brownberry Ovens brand any longer.
Step Two: Chop up two huge onions into cubes roughly half the size of the bread cubes. Use the knife you got as a wedding present for your failed marriage and the cutting board you inherited from your dead lover.
Step Three: Using the knife, sweep the chopped onion into the roasting pan lid on top of the bread cubes.
Step Four: Still using the knife and the cutting board, chop two bunches of celery into slices roughly a quarter inch thick. If the stalks are wide, cut them in half vertically first.
Step Five: Using the knife yet again, sweep the celery from your dead lover’s cutting board to the lid of your dad’s turkey roasting pan.
Step Six: Using the wooden spoon like the old one your great-grandmother gave you years and years ago for your abruptly ended engagement just six weeks before the wedding, stir the onion, celery, and bread cubes together.
Step Seven: Eat a handful of bread cubes, raw onion, and celery, remembering how you used to sneak it when your dad wasn’t looking. Not that he would have cared.
Step Eight: Using the wooden spoon and your fingers, stuff as much of the bread cube mixture as you can into the cavity of the turkey. Remember the time you forgot to remove the giblets and neck. Laugh.
Step Nine: Put the heavily buttered, salted, peppered, and stuffed turkey into the oven. Don’t forget to preheat the oven.
Step Ten: Fish around for the large glass baking dish from who-knows-where.
Step Eleven: Pour the remaining bread cube mixture into the glass baking dish. Wonder what happened to the blue and white Corningware that your dad always used.
Step Twelve: Dot with butter (real) and moisten with giblet/neck broth you have simmering on the stove with a bay leaf. Laugh again about the year you didn’t take them out of the turkey before stuffing.
Step Thirteen: Cover the dish with tin foil and set aside until the turkey is done. (Sneak a handful of moistened bread cube mixture first.)
Step Fourteen: Gather the dirty utensils – the knife, the cutting board, the wooden spoon. Remember your wedding and the photograph of you pretending to stab your new husband with the cake knife.
Step Fifteen: Remember your dad asking, “Punkin, is this what you want?” just before he walked you down the aisle.
Step Sixteen: Stare out the window and wipe the tears.
W. Va. Fur and Root 