Even when I was around 5 or 6, I remember being bothered that my parents insisted I eat meat. My dad, a hunter and fisher type, especially seemed aggressive in his demands I “eat what’s on my plate”. I wondered why they seemed to enjoy torturing me by forcing me to eat things I didn’t like. I mean, really, what had I ever done to them? I mean aside from the time I tried to flush an entire hamburger down the toilet…and the time I vomited liver back onto my plate. Besides that, what?
I distinctly remember the one occasion when dad made me “try” liver. It was indeed scene from the Dinner of Revenge. However, instead of being left at the table long after everyone else was finished until I finally caved in and took a bite, I had a different approach.
“One bite”, he demanded, and so I lifted up the fork, bit off a piece of liver, swallowed without biting it, and then immediately barfed it back up onto my plate. That was my first and last bite of liver. In later years, dad and I would battle it out over hamburgers (me: “can’t you just make them flat like McDonald’s does?!?!” True quote.), venison, and pork chops.
Eventually, my mom got tricky on me: she started making hot dishes. If you’ve never tried picking each tiny hamburger chunk out of Hamburger Helper, then I’m here to tell you it isn’t worth it. Fortunately, hot dishes did make it easier to get meat down, as it is hard to taste much of anything that is mixed with a can of Cream of Mushroom soup. Some hot dish meals I loathed were tuna casserole and all Hamburger Helper meals. Warmed tuna sets off my gag reflex to this day, and like Hamburger Helper, it’s extremely difficult to separate out flakes of tuna from the other things in there because they all stick together. Despite my repeated protests that I absolutely, positively, do not like eating Hamburger Helper, Mommy!!!!!, it still continued to appeared on the dinner table without fail.
Yet there was one hot dish I didn’t mind eating. It was a little delicacy my mom would often cook up called “Booger Hot dish”. It was a hot dish that not just my mom made, but all my aunts had on rotation too. If I went to one of my aunt’s house and told her I wanted Booger Hot dish for lunch, she wouldn’t think I was being a disgusting little smart ass, she would know what I meant, and probably already have leftovers of it stockpiled in the fridge. Booger hot dish was this: cooked hamburger, rice, cream of mushroom, and soy sauce, mixed and baked. I never thought to ask why it was called Booger Hot dish. It’s one of those memories you can have that is so embedded in your very being that you don’t even question the oddness of it. Booger Hot dish simply was Booger Hot dish. So, maybe I liked it because it had a funny name? Or maybe I liked it because I couldn’t actually see the hamburger in it and it just tasted like salt. So with Booger hot dish, my mom and aunts had found a winner. Everyone loved it. My sisters, my cousins, we were all willing to eat it and plus, it was cheap.
As I got older and my parents started making a little more money, hot dishes became less common. By the time I was in high school, I really don’t remember eating hot dishes at all, aside from the odd Tator-Tot hot dish that might appear in the Church basement.
One summer when I was in college, I was browsing through one of my mom’s cookbooks and I spotted the worn and stained recipe for Booger Hot dish.
“MOM!” I yelled all excitedly, “Booger Hot dish! You haven’t made this in SUCH a long time!"
“I haven’t been angry at your dad in a long time”, she replied, “He hated that hot dish”.
*see how my Mom spelled it "Buger"? HA!
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