Hello everyone!! This is just a little Saturday post, where if you want to chat about soup that you have made or eaten or a recipe you have, and tell a story about your life, a memory, a book you are reading, anything, here is your chance! I plan on posting this later in the day like I did today.
Today’s soup was made by my mother-in-law! Homemade wonton soup, and it is delicious and warm and not something I get to eat very often. I love wonton soup though and I needed some soup today! We got up early to go to the Christmas parade and it was very chilly first thing this morning!
It was perfect. I loved that it was not overly salty, and she added water chestnuts which I love. It was very warming and I was thankful to have it.
Last weekend Chrissy, my sister-in-law, and I were standing in the kitchen at my dad’s reminiscing about our grandmothers. It started with spaghetti, and she talked about how when she was little, one of her very favorite things was her grandmother’s house on cold days, because her grandma would always have a pot of bolognese sauce simmering away on the stove. She said it would bubble away for hours, while they played and her mom and grandma visited, and it smelled so good, and she couldn’t wait to eat it. She said it would get a layer of grease on top, and when I asked if she ate that, she emphatically said, yes, that it was part of the experience, and they would dip their bread into it too. Her memory sounded so vivid and I could imagine the feeling that would give, of family and homeliness, and it made me remember my grandmothers’ kitchens.
Neither of them ever really had any money, but you never went hungry when you visited. In fact, quite the opposite. Both would steam the windows of their houses up, cooking and baking. My grandma Marian, whose birthday would have been tomorrow actually, made the best chicken paprikash, the best bean soup (which I don’t have the recipe for and haven’t found anything to replicate it), and the best rice pudding. The chicken paprikash is the one I remember the best. She made it with the dumplings, and they were my favorite part, those little bits of dough were like treasures for some reason, and I would search the bowl for them before moving on to the rest of the bowl. We would all be crammed into her smallish kitchen, seated around her round wooden table, and I would be next to my cousin Melissa in the back, squished along the wall because we were the littlest and youngest.
Now my grandma Keedy, she was also a good cook and baker, and I live in the house that was hers, so I am continuing to make memories here. I remember our crowded Thanksgivings and Christmases, my entire rowdy family spread out wherever we could find a seat until dinner, when we again would cram around a table in the dining room, until the year when my cousin Brian, Meghan, Michael, and my brother Devin and I got our own table in the other room. We had slightly outgrown this tiny house but that didn’t stop us from being together.
The kitchen here, the one that my grandma used, is so tiny. I joke all the time that they built this house and then were like, “Oh no we forgot the kitchen” and managed to squeak one in. Despite its diminutive size, my grandma would turn out a huge feast, complete with turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, corn, salad, cranberry sauce, and Yorkshire pudding, followed by pumpkin pie, cherry pie, coconut tarts and Empire biscuits. We all would fight over the last piece of Yorkshire pudding, and had great debates over which dessert was better, the tarts or the biscuits. I have always been a coconut tarts fan but I am among the minority. The house would be so hot from the stove working hard all day, and after dinner my cousins, brother, and I would go back to the den in the back of the house. We would occupy ourselves with books or and drawing and tv if there was a tv in there, which wasn’t always the case, and my brother and boy cousins would wrestle and Meghan and I would try to stay out of the way because they would get wild and it was not that big of a room.
Inevitably we would get bored and wander back into the dining room and living room, and listen to the stories our parents and grandparents were telling, about dancing at the highland games or the time my uncle scored for the opposite team during a basketball game in middle school or ice skating on the creek, or how my mom was hula-hoop champion in elementary school and got to hula-hoop before a high school football game, where my aunt was a cheerleader.
I feel like I have so many memories wrapped up in these nights, dinners and meals with family, and I hope that I am providing these memories to Wyatt. I want him to remember these holidays with fondness one day, the food that we made, the stories we told.
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle has an awesome soup and story to share as well!! Check out her post here!
And that is it from me today. Thanks for stopping by, and if you have anything you want to share, please leave a link below! InLinkz is still telling me that it is incompatible which is annoying, so if you leave a link in the comments, I will share it in my post!
Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.. 
Aww, this post made me remember family dinners (usually just the holidays) at my Grandma Luderman’s. She couldn’t cook to save herself, but she was the absolute best baker! They had this big chest freezer, and it was always full of tins of homemade cookies. She didn’t eat them, and I don’t think she let Grandpa eat them, either. I honestly don’t know who they were for unless she just liked to bake and have them there. I do know both of them were very poor as they were growing up so, maybe, that full freezer made her feel better.
I don’t think I knew you lived in your grandma’s house. That is really cool. Mike had bought our first house a year before my grandparents sold theirs. We probably would have bought it because we both loved it…a little mini farm. If we’d bought that, we’d probably still be there, and life would have been much different, I’m sure. So, things go a certain way for a reason.
I did a soup and a story post today! I meant for the story to be funny, but most people didn’t get the humor of it!
https://marshainthemiddle.com/
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I love that – it must have made her feel secure knowing that she had food squirreled away. And did you get to eat any?
That would have been an amazing house! A mini farm is like a dream! But I agree, things go a certain way for a reason. We just have a mini house, no farm. Lololol. We are happy here though. It fits our little family.
I will pop over!!!
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I love hearing these memories! None of my grandparents were cooks so I don’t have memories like these… I do remember my memere making homemade mac and cheese and having me over since I was the only one in the family that liked her recipe which also included stewed/canned tomatoes. Come to think of it none of my boys’ grandparents are cooks so they aren’t going to have these kind of memories either. But someday they will talk about how their grandmother used to joke she baked and came walking in with a bucket of cookies from the Stop & Shop bakery every time she came to visit.
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Wyatt won’t really have the memories of his grandparents cooking like I did, but he will remember family gathered and his aunt Chrissy’s cooking, or mine or Billy’s. And homemade mac and cheese is fantastic, although I have not had it with tomatoes before! What a cool memory that is, and something you shared.
Lol! That is like what Wyatt will have, especially with my dad. Your boys will probably remember those cookies and wish for that taste again. 🙂
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I love this story, Erin. I can still see in my mind almost every inch of my grandma’s kitchen — a huge Hoosier cabinet, a pump by the sink (now no longer is use but still there!) the way the cupboards were lined up. I spent so much time there — and yes, grandmothers knew how to cook. They had to. No microwaves! Loved this!
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That kitchen sounds perfectly like a grandmother’s kitchen! So cozy. And yes! Microwaves do make things easier! We just got our first one last year and I am shocked that I was able to go as long as we did without one!
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We had a Hoosier cabinet growing up and my parents still have it! Visitors are always confused when my mom would tell them to get something out of the Hoosier.
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Pingback: My Sunday-Monday Post – Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs..
I am getting that note about the linkz code being incompatible but it is still working when I use it so give it a try next week and see what happens. I have to add it on my laptop for it to work.
I’m afraid to contact WordPress about it because they haven’t done much for my bots issue other than telling me it’s no big deal I’m getting 10,000 views a week from about 50 cities in China.
Anyhow, on to the post — this post truly gave me the warmest, homiest feeling as I read it. Our family wasn’t large so we didn’t have as many cousins to hang out with as you did but we still have some larger family gatherings around Christmas.
The main soups I remember are from my mom since neither of my grandmothers were really cooks.
My mom made vegetable beef soup (my favorite) and hamburger stew (loved the taste, hated the texture) and chili (hate it as a child, now love it) and my parents team up and make amazing bean and ham soup, or sometimes just bean soup. the key ingredients are butter beans and ham hock and then they also add sweet red peppers.
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Really? Ok, I will just ignore it and see if it works. It is really annoying!
Wow you are really popular in China!
Aw thank you Lisa. I think all the soup and coziness makes me nostalgic.
Ok all of those sound amazing! And that bean soup! Billy loves butter beans, Ibet he would like that! Vegetable beef too, yum!!
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I love soup, especially wonton soup, and good stories so I may be joining in soon.
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Yay!!! I would love that!!
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I hadn’t realised you lived in your grandma’s house, how lovely! My maternal grandma was NOT a good cook, I have a terrible memory of saying, “But these rock buns are simply unpalatable” at the age of eight or something! My maternal gran was a Good Plain Cook and I would have liver and onions (blech, now) at hers while watching the wrestling or other commercial tv! Matthew made soup today, actually – he makes a veggie soup once a week in his soup maker in the winter, puts it into five portions then each day he adds some chicken or Spanish chorizo to it as he reheats it.
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We do! It is a tiny little house, built in the 40s for the factory workers and their families at the time.
LOL! Don’t we all have those awful memories of being a kid with no filter?
Dang, wow. Did you like them then? Or eat them out of politeness? I know people love them though. Ooo Spanish chorizo in soup sounds fantastic!!
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I wouldn’t eat liver now but it was kind of exotic then!
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