putting things to good use

is good karma ... trust me on this.

Funny story. At Josh's party last weekend my sister gave me a twenty pound bag of weird German cooking sauce mixes (google Knorr or Maggi and you'll see what I'm talking about). Apparently my sister collected these mixes from my mom's house after she passed, (along with a boatload of spice bottles, and a truckload of frozen meats; if we let any of it go to waste we all knew my mother would never forgive us).

All these weird packets are printed in German, and my sister didn't know what to do with them; so, of course, she gave them to me. A gigantic red Macy's bag filled to the brim with them. For safe keeping I guess.

Monday was President's Day, and I was lucky to enough to have it off. I was in a very mellow mood. The perfect holiday-do-nothing mindset. I found myself spending much of the afternoon doing nothing by sorting a giant pile of cooking packets into smaller piles, arranging them by their packaging pictures (soups, beef dishes, gravies ... ). Invested, I grabbed a handful of various mixes, holed up in my home office, and consulted a German-English on-line dictionary for a few hours and tried to make sense out of the instructions. In my study I quickly learned that "fix" in German means "fast," and "klug" means "clever".

I made a home for every bit of this stuff in my cupboards, stored and organized them, and found myself determined to put all of it to good use. I then drafted a menu plan for entire week (OCD nutcase here ... embrace it), and was hellbent on using a metric ton of this stuff -- immediately! -- so I could recognize the German language well enough to avoid having to consult BabelFish every ten minutes while I'm cooking in the future ...

Kicking this project off, last night I made meatloaf, a soup, and a salad all using these weird little mixes. And suddenly, my kitchen smelled oddly familiar ( ... hmmm, that's weird... ); then, after a quick taste of the soup, my mouth was psychically transported back to a weekend at Mom's.

So, it looks like much of that home-cooked food?! So many of my mom's "signature dishes"?! Well, a whole bunch of them have a genesis of these crazy mini German freeze-dried packs. She'd just add in some fresh ingredients at the end to finish it proper and cover her tracks .....

Hilarious.

The woman never let on. Never told. When I'd ask her how she made this amazing mushroom soup every Thanksgiving it was just "her recipe," and she'd toss me a few ancient cookbooks, written in German, for me to figure out how to make.

Too funny.

So, here I sit, with at least fifteen mixes of Mom's Goulash, just sitting in my cupboard -- and, like a wave of good karma, all of it just waiting to be unearthed and offered to fortunate persons for whom it was meant by high and benevolent forces.

Which I suppose now makes me overdue in inviting my sister, brother, and father over for dinner. And when they ask how I finally dialed in Mom's goulash so perfectly?! I'll just offer them one of those weird 1950s cookbooks; bindings hanging by a thread, pages dark and yellowed, and margins scribbled by kids during hours of serene and perfect boredom in warm kitchens long ago.

And smile to my mom.

Today, February 17, is my Mom's birthday. And it's a blessing to spend it with her.