Wow. That beats my mother's potato salad (two parts potato, one part cooked carrot, one part cooked onion, Thousand Island dressing). I am impressed.

Oh, yeah. Or, "You're just not *letting* yourself like it." My mom had a guilt trip she'd lay on me, to the effect that I was deliberately *refusing* to like food X (textured vegetable protein, a soy-based meat substitute which she cooked plain) or recipe Y (tuna salad made of one can of the cheapest grade of tuna, three or four cups of chopped celery, a cup of chopped onion, and half a bottle of Kraft Thousand Island dressing instead of mayonnaise) out of some indefinable combination of snobbery and spite.

I was watching a Deadwood on DVD the other night and a line from it has stuck in my head:

"What claim has your piety on my deference?"

My mom went on binges, and took me and Kid Bro with her. (She was raising us on her own.) For a few months in 1971, "egg soup" was the staple, sometimes ten meals a week. Then there was the TVP stretch -- she bought a metric fuckton of textured vegetable protein at a Mormon bulk-foods store, and put in everything, in the sadistic certainty that I must really like it and was only complaining about it to inconvenience her. There was the brown-rice period, in the 1970s: short grain brown rice, overcooked in too much water, to a sort of semisolid gruel, then buttered and salted: that was dinner. Tuna salad: one, only one, can of the cheapest tuna, mixed with at least four cups of chopped celery, a cup or two of chopped onion, a good big scoop of sweet pickle relish, and half a bottle of Isweartogod KRAFT THOUSAND ISLAND DRESSING. I will hate Thousand Island dressing to my last day.

Yeah. My mother thought she could cook.

For some reason this topic reminds me of the opening chapter of Jessamyn West's "Cress Delehanty", where the twelve-year-old heroine, alone in the house for the day, makes a lunch of a mud-colored, mud-textured mixture of condensed milk, sugar, and cocoa powder.

As for me, I heat Campbell's Chunky Chicken-Broccoli-Cheese soup and pour it over a baked potato.

No "low-fat" or "reduced-fat" or "fat free" versions of ingredients that in their genuine versions are fat-based. Sour cream is made out of CREAM: therefore there is no such thing as "fat-free sour cream". Mayonnaise is made out of egg, oil, and lemon juice: thus, similarly, there is no such thing as "reduced-fat mayonnaise", and anything claiming this title is not mayonnaise.

No Hungry Girl recipes.

No no no. According to Sir Terry Pratchett, the four major food groups are salt, sugar, grease, and burnt crunchy bits.

Gad. For one thing, my mom was one of the great non-cooks of all time, but she *thought* she could cook. She'd go on these strange food binges, like the time she bought several big canisters (the size of a three-pound coffee can) of TVP, textured vegetable protein, at the Mormon storable-food store. TVP, for those fortunate enough not to be familiar with it, is an alleged "meat substitute"; little rock-hard cubes to be reconstituted with water and cooked with a dish. It has a strange spongy texture, and none of the flavors taste *anything* like what they're labeled as: the "beef" flavor is almost but not quite entirely unlike beef, the chicken flavor tastes like nothing that's ever been near any kind of poultry, the pork flavor tastes primarily of salt.

As I say, these are intended to be cooked *into* entire dishes such as soups or stews or casseroles. But since Mom was a non-cook, half the time her idea was to reconstitute the stuff, simmer it for a few minutes, and just serve it up in a bowl. And my rejection of it had nothing to do with the substance itself: I must be lying if I said I didn't like it, or just *refusing* to like it *as I certainly would* if I'd only *allow* myself to. After all, I liked chicken, and it was labeled "chicken flavor", right?

My experience is that the Lean Cuisine and Smart Ones dinners aren't necessarily very filling, so I throw a handful of chopped veggies or sliced mushrooms on top before cooking. (There will be enough sauce. There is *always* enough sauce.) Then drizzling a teaspoon or so of olive oil adds some flavor and a healthy-oils serving as well, and is only one Point. You may have to increase the cooking time.

Not to say that my mother was one of the great non-cooks of all time, but ... well, she'd go on food binges and take me and Kid Bro along with her. You haven't lived until you've eaten a homemade, vegetarian, completely Western version egg drop soup for ten meals in the space of a week. It ran the gamut from very thin to watery scrambled eggs, and that was what we *ate* until Mom got tired of it.

Remember how Jeff Smith (Frugal Gourmet) used to deride his mother's "spaghetti with ketchup"? My mother had that beat. Roman Meal bread, buttered, spread with ketchup, topped with thick slices of Velveeta, stuck under the broiler until the cheese was barely starting to melt, and Wren why aren't you eating the *pizzas* I made for you? I made those because I know you love pizza so much!

Would you have felt less queasy if your Ozarkian friend had called it a pot-au-feu?

Hot French fries are French fries. Cold French fries are chunks of cold greasy potato.

I imagine you could cut them into chunks and put them in a frying pan with some onions and maybe mushrooms or something. Usually I give them to the dogs.

Sprout some of them: pour an inch or so into a quart jar, half fill it with water and stretch a piece of netting or fabric across the top. Secure it with a rubber band. Change the water every eight to twelve hours but do not refrigerate. By 36 hours after you start, they should be showing little sprout tips: at this point pour the water off and leave the jar on its side. Keep rinsing them a couple of times a day. After another 36 hours they should be ready to eat, and will continue ready to eat for several days. If they fill up the jar too quickly, *then* put it in the fridge to slow them down. Steam them or saute them. They're very good with potatoes, with eggs, or any place you'd put sauteed veggies (warning: raw they taste like soaked-but-uncooked beans). You will grow accustomed to the startling renewal (take out a third of the jar, by the next day it will be full again).