I grew up a bit differently from most youngsters. I preferred meat, fruit and even some vegetables to desserts. I suspect that many of you mothers and fathers might be wishing that you had an ideal child like me. My preferences might have been tied to the reality that my mother fed me baby foods until I was about twenty-eight. As I think about it, the people at Gerber didn’t produce a pureed version of German chocolate cake.
I also ate very little candy. On Halloween, I would come home from trick or treat, and my mother and I would sit on the floor sorting my take for the evening. We would sort my collection into three piles. I didn’t really get to assign anything to a particular pile; I was mostly an observer in the annual ritual. In one pile would go the things Mrs. Robertson made. Immediately after sorting, that pile went straight into our garbage can. My mother was sure that Mrs. Robertson let her eighty four cats walk all over the counters in her kitchen at will. My mother knew this because Mrs. Robertson’s sister-in-law had told her this (both the number of cats and the freedom that those felines were given.) The pile next to the toxic contributions of Mrs. Robertson was made up of any apples and small boxes of raisins that I had been given. The apples were always provided by the two dentists who lived in our neighborhood. That pile was mine. I was never too sure what happened to the third pile, the one that had candy of every sort imaginable and popcorn balls. My mother spirited those off to my parents bedroom, and I never saw them again. The only time I ever was allowed to have candy was when I visited one pair of grandparents. (My other grandparents just read me Bible verses all day, and convince me that God was not particularly enthusiastic about any behavior of a typical child.)
I subsequently learned not to blame my mother for my almost sugarless upbringing. I now know that somewhere there is a hidden school for mothers where they learn to protect their children from all things with a pleasurable flavor. I know this because my wife exhibited the same behavior with our son on Halloween that my mother employed. That was typically followed by a couple weeks of repeated, “Do I look fat to you?” It didn’t take me long to realize that such a question demands a very rapid response; one should not even pause for a breath.
When I became a full fledged adult at the magical age of twenty-nine, I began to learn that applesauce, vegetables and meat in their natrual form do not really have the same texture. I also discovered the wonders of dessert in the wonderful form of a gourmet cheesecake. Well, I guess it really wasn’t gourmet. It came from a discount food warehouse, in a flimsy box with a cellophane peep hole that revealed the only attractive portion of the product. But to my mouth that was primarily accustomed to pale brown meat in almost liquid form and thoroughly mashed green beans, it was heavenly.
Later in life, as I belatedly went through my experimental wild years, I learned that cheesecake could taste much less like cardboard than my first sample. In addition, I discovered that cheesecake, the wonder food, actually comes in lots of different flavors.
Dessert is now my favorite time of day. The best way to top off a well balanced meal of two jars of meat, three jars of thoroughly squashed squash and a banana is with a slice of turtle cheesecake. But please don’t tell my mother; she’ll just take it from me.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the foggiest notion of how to go about actually making a cheesecake. Please tell me if you have a good recipe. Make sure that your recipe doesn’t require using either an oven or a whisk. I do know how to use a blender, though, because I watched my mom prepare the Thanksgiving turkey one year.
Author’s notation: I may have taken some creative liberties with slight exaggerations here and there, but I’m not concerned about being caught. My mother is still not sure what the Internet is.
