At least twice a month for forty years, Mrs. Olson has made some version of what we call ‘hotdish’ (state law requires any interview with a local chef to include a question about ‘hotdish’).
That’s over a thousand freaking casseroles and at least a thousand cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, but when I asked her if the thought of all that made her tired, she just said, “Noooo, it’s part of motherhood.”
Do the math—this woman has prepared at least two meals a day for almost half a century. Oh, and she’s been doing it without a lot of gadgets.
She owns a food processor, but she bought it to make one specific thing (a British shortbread recipe) and that’s all she uses it for.
When I asked her what her favorite utensil is, she thought for a few moments, and then said “It would have to be my wire whisk.”
Mrs. Olson learned about cooking at a young age:
“My mother cooked absolutely fabulous . . . and she was a baker. I used to envy the kids that could have Wonder Bread—all our bread was homemade.
She was happy in the kitchen. She was ten when her dad died and there were nine children in the family, and she said she got stuck in the kitchen and learned to love it.”
Carl’s maternal grandma may have been a “fabulous cook,” but to hear him tell it, she made one horribly memorable mistake.
Allegedly, one day she made beet Jell-o. Now I’m with you. The words ‘beet’ and ‘Jell-o’ should never be that close to each other.
I don’t even want to hear someone say “I had some beets, and then later had some Jell-o.” There should be at least a paragraph between those two words at all times. But let’s have mom address the incident:
“She knew he liked beets, and she found a recipe for it—it wasn’t beet Jell-o it was beet gelatin (that’s much more appetizing).
It was ‘formed,’ and to him it was Jell-o. She was just so pleased when she brought this to the table, and then he couldn’t eat it . . .”
In the spirit of full disclosure, I asked if she tasted the beet . . . gelatine—
“No, no, no. It had chunks of cucumber, and diced celery . . . It’s like she had cooked them and ground them up, almost like an aspic?
And it just . . . ohhhhhhh.” (By the way, in print you can’t tell, but it wasn’t a good ‘ohhhhhhh.’)”
Before I talked with his mom, Carl told me that “she was at the vanguard in bringing ethnic cuisine to small-town Minnesota,”
However, Mrs. Olson was quick to deflect any praise.
“Noooooo, that was his take on it. But one of my favorite things to do is to walk through the grocery store, and if there’s something I haven’t seen before and I don’t know what it is, then I look at the package for directions.
If not, I buy it, bring it home, and go online. The internet is indispensable!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that some things on the internet aren’t true.
In addition to her cosmopolitan (and seemingly random) approach to meal planning, she hasn’t lost touch with her Scandinavian roots.
She mentioned römmegröt, which I’ve since learned is a porridge made from sour cream, whole milk, wheat flour, butter and salt. Apparently, you can add cinnamon to it to make it more like . . . food.
Not many people rave about lefse, a traditional Norwegian flatbread; that’s probably because it’s traditional, Norwegian, and flat.
Mrs. Olson was quick to defend lefse as anything but boring:
“There’s nothing better than soft, fresh right-out-of-the-pan lefse with butter and sugar. I make the dough, but the boys still do the rolling and baking. It’s the kind of thing, when everyone’s together right before Christmas . . . you like to keep people busy.”
Speaking of family, I asked about her husband, and she told me,
“He wasn’t around a lot. He had a very intensive, demanding job, so he would show up for meals and take off again.”
That makes me imagine that her husband was some sort of spy, working dangerous undercover missions under an assumed name, undercover in small-town Minnesota, but I have no proof of this.
Even without an espionage subplot, I figured with four kids, there had to have been some drama at mealtimes, so I asked her how she handled the inevitable ‘finicky eater.’
“I don’t have a lot of patience with that. You know, you say grace, you bless the food . . . and now you don’t wanna eat it?”
As to the age-old problem of getting kids to eat their veggies, she suggested some tips:
“You can put vegetables in places where they don’t take ‘em out so easily.. You can sneak ‘em in places (in the lefse dough?). And even the most finicky eater will eat them raw with a dip.
I always figured they had to take three bites of something, and if they didn’t like it, I didn’t push it, because sometimes kids have a definite aversion to something.”
I wish I could have gotten away with telling my mom I didn’t want to eat something because I had an aversion to it.
Flipping the question around, I asked Mrs. Olson if there was anything she wouldn’t eat. As an example, I mentioned my feelings about beef liver, and I think I touched a nerve.
“Yeah, I don’t eat that anymore. We had to eat it once a week when I was growing up and . . . I will never eat that again.”
As experienced in the kitchen as she might be, Mrs. Olson knows her limitations. She offered a lovely, pastoral story of Carl’s brother, a fox, and a crockpot—
“One day he did shoot a fox and he skinned it and he says, ‘Mom, you gotta cook this—it was like skinning our dog!” He said ‘I just hate to waste it.’
And so I called several of the older women whose husbands hunted and said, ‘How do you cook a fox?’ and one of them says, ‘Mary, I’ve never heard of anybody cooking a fox. I don’t know if it can be done.’
So, I put it in the crockpot, with lots of celery, and onions, and tomatoes, and it wasn’t too long and the smell of wet fur filled the house.
I brought the fox out and I said to Mark, ‘You take the first bite,’ so he did, and he said ‘Mom, why don’t you just take it outside. Just . . . take it outside.’”
“Years later, I read A Year in Provence, and there’s story of an old guy who would tell people how to cook fox—and it was a joke! You cannot cook fox.”
We moved on to happier memories when I asked her about a dinner for Carl’s groomsmen. There were about forty people, and she prepared a whole twenty-five pound salmon.
Of course, with the salmon, she also prepared baked potatoes with rosemary, lemon, and balsamic vinegar, and a whole head of cauliflower that was on a bed of baby peas with a smoked Gouda sauce, and two kinds of salad, and four kinds of pie. You know, like anyone would. Back to the salmon:
“I did not think ahead. I didn’t have a pan for anything that big, so I had to construct a pan. I put two jelly roll pans together with layers of aluminum foil.
It filled up the whole oven, so of course then the air couldn’t circulate, and the salmon took forever . . . GAAAH! So embarrassing. But it tasted fine.”
Like all great chefs, Mrs. Olson has needed to think on her feet. She shared with me an example of how she’s turned cooking mistakes into innovations—
“My favorite thing to make is a scratch thirteen egg-white angel food cake. Once, I took it out of the oven too soon, and you tip it over a bottle, and the whole thing just fell, all over the countertops.
But I decided, well, there ya go! So, I scooped it in dishes with fresh raspberries, and it was something no one had ever had before.”
Even the most seasoned chefs have their stories of dining debacles. For instance, here’s a story with all the elements of classic horror: a birthday party, baking, and fifth-graders left to their own devices:
“My daughter was having a birthday party in fifth grade. So I thought, what I’d do with all these girls, is I’d put them in teams of two.
And I put all the ingredients for a cake on the table, and
they would have to put the cake together without a recipe.
Well, one of the girls got the garlic powder out. The whole house smelled very strange, and because there was no proper measuring of the leavening agent, the oven—there were flames in the oven, smoke in the house . . . that was a wonderful disaster.”
Her other personal ‘kitchen nightmare’ happened when she was a newlywed—
“Soon after we were married, we invited some of the relatives over, and I had never, as a single gal, put together a meal with various courses, and nothing was ready together. Some things were overcooked and some things weren’t started, and it was so embarrassing.”
Forty years, and those are your worst cooking disasters? None of those stories involve injuries, or things blowing up!
Later, she gave me some insight into one of the biggest reasons she makes things from scratch, despite the risk of mishap.
“To keep it interesting. I used to make my own graham crackers, for example, and all kinds of fun things.
You know, when you’re home all day, and you have four kids in five years . . . you just give ‘em each a bowl, and go to it! It’s a mess, but it’s two hours killed.”
Even when talking about making a romantic meal for her husband, Mrs. Olson demonstrates old-fashioned heartland thrift and practicality.
Phil’s favorite dessert is crème brûlée, and I mentioned that I’d like to make it, but I don’t have one of those blowtorch thingies—
“I was at a kitchen shop, and they are thirty-five dollars, for the cheapest one I found! After (the crème brûlée) is chilled, I just put it under the broiler with sugar on it, and they all get done at the same time.
You have to watch it, but that’s the way they do it in France. (The torches are) just something more to sell at the kitchen store.”
As they might say in Willmar, meeting Mrs. Olson was a hoot. What I appreciated the most about her was that no-nonsense, Midwestern logic. After all, it’s helped her cook at least fifteen thousand meals. I did the math.
You can’t talk with somebody’s mom for half an hour and not come away with some wisdom. This is how Mrs. Olson remembers her childhood—
“My dad was a letter carrier and my mother never worked outside the home, so money was tight.
But I remember meals, when it was time for a paycheck to come, and we’d have oatmeal for supper with ice cream on top, and we all thought we were kings.”
When I asked her for a family recipe she might like me to include in this book, she pointed out that “any recipe is just sorta the beginning.”
While that’s certainly true, I don’t think I would tinker too much with a recipe from Mrs. Olson. Especially one that was awarded ‘runner-up’ in an actual, honest-to-goodness Betty Crocker contest! It doesn’t get much more real than that.
Mrs. Olson’s Piccadillo Chile
Ingredients
1 lb ground turkey
½ c sliced green onion
4 oz undrained chopped green chilies
1 clove garlic (minced)
½ c raisins
3 T almonds
1 ½ t chili powder
½ t cumin
½ t cinnamon
¼ t ground cloves
2 (8 oz) cans tomato sauce
1 (14.5 oz) can whole tomatoes
8 pimento stuffed olives (halved)
Brown meat, stirring and adding onions, chili and garlic. Cook 3 minutes, add raisins and remaining ingredients. Cover and reduce heat. Simmer at least 15 min.
Everything but the Cranberry
There are only a handful of childhood food memories that have stuck with me. Don’t misunderstand; it’s not that we didn’t eat well. But we never ate fancy.
Even on a fixed income, Mom always made sure we had some meat, some carbs and something green on our plates every evening at five (to this day, no matter when dinner is supposed to be, I still get hungry around four-thirty).
Dinner was always more satisfying than it was memorable. For some reason, the only entrée I really remember is her stuffed bell peppers. I didn’t understand cooking, but I thought it was cool that you could take something I didn’t like at all (green peppers), and an hour and a half later it would mysteriously taste great.
Another food memory, and one I can almost taste to this day, is of the first fish I ever caught (not that this is relevant, but it also is the only fish I’ve ever caught).
I was eight years old, and we were camping, and I caught one trout. Cooked it over an open fire next to where I caught it, and to this day, I think it’s the best-tasting fish I’ve ever had.
I also have fondish memories of a food item from the high school cafeteria. It was one of the rotating ‘main courses’ on the school lunch menu, and it was called a ‘Pepper Belly.’
A ‘Pepper Belly’ was a bag of Fritos corn chips, slit open on the side, covered with chili, cheese and chopped, raw onions. And it was considered a ‘main course.’ Even in high school, I thought, “This probably isn’t the healthiest lunch I could have.”
The strangest childhood food memories I have involve a pot belly stove. Part of the strangeness is that we had a pot belly stove.
For some reason, in our 1970s era kitchen, next to the avocado-colored fridge, was a wood-burning stove, like nineteenth-century pioneers would have used. And we weren’t exactly in the wilderness. I grew up in a tract house about ninety miles from Los Angeles.
We hardly ever used it—occasionally we’d fire it up to heat the kitchen (although since space heaters existed in the seventies, I think my stepdad got it so that he could add ‘chopping wood’ to my list of chores).
My mom rarely cooked on it, either, but every Christmas morning, I would wake up to the smell of fried eggs and sausage cooking in butter on top of our potbelly stove.
That smell defined Christmas for me, especially since our family was staunchly in the ‘gifts are opened on Christmas morning not Christmas eve’ camp.
As a boy, the aroma of eggs cooking on a wood-burning stove meant I might be minutes away from something that had been on my Christmas list for months.
After a couple of years of finding my way around a kitchen, I cooked my first holiday meal last Thanksgiving. In retrospect, I should have chosen an easier holiday (there must be some quick and simple Arbor Day recipes out there).
But I forged ahead, planning to make everything from scratch with one important exception—the cranberry sauce.
I know there are plenty of recipes for homemade cranberry sauce, but for me, cranberry sauce comes out of a can, shaken onto a plate in one solid mass, still marked by lines from the inside of the can.
I don’t care if you slow-roasted your bird for eighteen hours, lovingly mashed each potato by hand, and picked the green beans yourself, if there’s not a tube of cranberry ‘sauce’ on the table, I’ll have Thanksgiving dinner somewhere else, thank you very much.
I bought a five pound, bone-in turkey breast, patted it dry, and added a spice rub mix I made, and then I slathered the skin with butter. It’s not like we were celebrating National Health Food Day.
The side dishes included homemade mashed potatoes with cumin and roasted Brussels sprouts with a drizzle of lemon juice, a sprinkle of kosher salt and some cracked black pepper.
I made my own dressing, too. I would have made ‘stuffing,’ but apparently stuffing the bird before you cook it isn’t safe anymore, even though people have done it that way for hundreds of years.
Here’s where it gets a little weird: some recipes for stuffing / dressing include eggs, some don’t. I opted to go with eggs.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m not very diligent about measuring things, and after guessing at the ‘right’ amount of bread and eggs, I could see it was too goopy. Sorta looked like Gerber’s.
So, I added more bread. Great—now it’s too dry. More egg, right? And then, at a certain point, I had no more room in my little blender. And my ‘dressing’ still looked like baby food.
Since I was worried about my turkey, and I had no experience with Brussels sprouts, and my potatoes were going to be finished way too early, something had to give.
Needing a quick resolution to the Great Dressing Fiasco of 2011, I grabbed a meatloaf pan and poured the putative ‘dressing mixture in.’ Then I shoved it into a toaster oven until I was ready to deal with it.
The reviews of my first holiday meal? The turkey was terrific, the sprouts were spectacular, and the potatoes were . . . well, they were mashed potatoes. Might have been a bit heavy-handed with the cumin.
And as for my transmogrified dressing? Well, it tasted like dressing. Or maybe it tasted like stuffing. However, it looked more like meatloaf, and you had to slice it like a loaf of bread. So on some level, what I ended up doing was taking some bread, and turning it into . . . a different kind of bread.
The most amazing thing about my first Thanksgiving dinner was that, as crazy as the experience was, it didn’t make me crazy. In fact, cooking always makes me feel a little less crazy.
I have a feeling Mom would have been proud of my effort. I wish she could have been there to see it. She might have been able to help me with the dressing, but then again, she probably would have just told me to get out of the kitchen while she made it herself.
(Not) About the Author
This being my first book, I should probably tell you a bit about who I am. I should, but I think it would be more revealing to tell you who I’m not. So I went soul-searching.
Actually, I went ‘ego-surfing,’ which is typing your own name into a search engine to seeing what’s been written about you. The great thing about ego-surfing is that it’s both pointless and self-centered.
And, instead of comparing myself to everyone on the planet (where I would rank somewhere around 3,465,218,107th), I can at least see if I’m one of the most successful people named ‘Michael Dane.’
Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies Page 14