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Today is Mother’s Day. Restaurants around the country will be welcoming families to fabulous breakfasts, brunches, and dinners. by Wendel Potter
Well, at least the restaurant owners will be in a welcoming mood because they, like Hallmark, will reap huge profits from this day’s celebration. The kitchen and wait staff, comprised of mothers who have to work, may not be particularly happy about it.
According to my indepth studies, Mother’s Day ranks highest in restaurant incidents of food being served with hairs and spit, courtesy of disgruntled employees who are also mothers.
Nevertheless, there’s good money to be made in the restaurant business on this Mother of all dining out days. Restaurants prey on the fact that a lazy man’s idea of celebrating the institution of motherhood is to herd the family through a buffet line.
Me? I’m grilling ribs. That’s at the request of my wife and her mother, by the way.
A sumptuous pile of country style pork ribs is thawing in my kitchen as I write this. Soon they’ll be thrown into a pot of water and apple juice where they’ll boil a short time before the marination process begins.
I won’t go into any details about my marinade. That’s my own secret.
Along about five o’clock, when the coals are white hot, I’ll slap those succulent sauce-slathered ribs on the grill. Then we’ll eat and the mothers at our table will enjoy the meal they asked for.
Grilling on Mother’s Day conjures up memories of my own mom. Mainly because she, too, grilled on Mother’s Day.
Well, she had to if we were going to eat. We sure as hell weren’t dining out.
Yesterday, I was visiting by phone with my oldest brother. The subject of grilling came up and he began reminiscing about our late mother (Mom passed away in 1995) and how she grilled chicken on the rotisserie nearly every Sunday during the summers of our youth.
I reminded him that Dad never went near a grill in his life, except for that moment in the store when he pointed to a grill on sale and said to the clerk, “Throw in a bag of charcoal and you‘ve got a deal!”.
“He didn’t help with the grilling?” my brother asked.
“Never. Every Sunday, Mom would wheel the grill out of the garage (I think she also unloaded it off the pickup when Dad first brought it home), dump the charcoal in, get the fire going, then return to the kitchen where she’d prepare the chickens.”
“Dad probably cleaned up after dinner,” Bro asserted.
“Don’t think so. I have a graphic image of Mom shoveling the coals out of the grill into a bucket of water to cool. Then she cleaned up the grill and put it back in the garage.”
As I recall, once those used coals were cooled in the bucket, she drained them, dried them in the sun, then used them to make a rock garden. Mom was frugally creative.
Even on those long ago Mother’s Days, Mom commandeered the grilling activities from start to finish. That began right after she had finished cleaning up the kitchen following the big Mother’s Day breakfast….that she cooked for us.
Somewhere during the course of the morning, Mom had been presented with her festive Mother’s Day gifts. Dad always bought her a box of candy, along with a nice dress (not too nice..she might get it dirty washing windows) or a bottle of perfume (they called it toilet water back then and it sold for 3 bucks a gallon).
We kids knew exactly what to get her: barbecue accessories.
So the routine continued for years at our house. As I got older, I helped Mom with the grilling. I didn’t want her doing all the work and besides, she was becoming disgruntled and had begun spitting in the food.
Eventually, after I was married, she and Dad would come to our house for Mother’s Day. Although I don’t think Mom was ever comfortable being waited on. Dad had no problem with that.
So now it’s come full circle. It’s Mother’s Day and I’m grilling. That’s the way it should be.
And this evening, when the ribs have been eaten and the grill has been cleaned and the day has wound down, I’ll wander out to my back yard where it will be peaceful and I can dwell for a few minutes on pleasant memories of my mom……while I putter in my charcoal rock garden.
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Copyright 2010 Wendel Potter
1 comment:
Wendel- how true this is of your Mom and mine in their Mullen ways. My mom left grilling to my Dad, who enjoyed it, but the cleanup was usually hers and of course, all the side dishes and dessert, etc. She never seemed to mind,though. Hard working women, God bless em!
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