The Meat and Potatoes of Life

by Molinari, Lisa Smith;

  One summer, after expensive and slightly sketchy go-kart tracks had been patronized, bug-infested mini-golf courses played, and scorching sand dunes climbed, someone suggested the last resort: crabbing. The kids loved the suspense and adventure of reeling in and scooping up dangerous crustaceans. The adults were less enthusiastic, because we knew the truth about crabbing. It’s inconvenient, hot, dirty, smelly, and labor-intensive. However, we gave in, perhaps lured by the potential for relaxing in our beach chairs between catches, intervals that might be anywhere from thirty seconds to a full twenty-four-hour-and-fifty-two-minute tidal cycle.

  It was a trade-off. To earn those moments of relaxation, first we had to forage for equipment: nets, long strings with sinkers and hooks tied on one end, and bait—the stinkier the better. We also needed secondary supplies: beach chairs, of course; games and books for the inevitable boredom while waiting for a bite; a first-aid kit in case of the wrong kind of bite.

  Finally, we needed one cooler for cold beverages and another one for our catch. Experience taught us never to use the beverage cooler to hold the crabs, unless we wanted them marinated in Budweiser. The claws of an angry, cornered crab could pierce a beer can with one snap. Also, the convenience of lugging only one cooler was never worth the risk of severe puncture wounds when reaching in for a cold one.

  Finally, we had to haul everything to a suitable dock on the bay. After setting up our chairs and unraveling our crabbing strings, we placed rotting chicken necks or fish heads firmly on each hook. We chucked the baited hooks several feet into the bay, tied the strings to the dock, then plopped into our comfy lawn chairs and opened our first round of cold beverages.

  Aaah, crabbing’s not so bad, we thought—briefly.

  Francis caught the first crab. He felt a twitch and pulled his string ever so slowly, luring the unsuspecting crab toward the dock. When he finally saw it in the water at the end of his line, he gasped, jumped, and knocked over his beer.

  “I got one! Grab the net!” he shouted.

  Miraculously, he had not scared away his catch, so Maz grabbed a net to scoop up the crab as it reached the surface, while Francis yelled helpfully, “Get the damned thing, for Pete’s sake!”

  Unfortunately when depositing the crab in the cooler, Maz missed, and the crabby fugitive went scrambling around on the dock while the kids hopped up and down emitting bloodcurdling screams.

  Francis eventually got his first crab in the cooler. Now, all we had to do was repeat that feat ninety-six more times to yield enough meat to feed our family of eleven, as long as we also served corn on the cob, watermelon, bread, hamburgers, salad, beans, and plenty of desserts.

  On another summer day, we were saved all these trials when a rental car pulled up to the corner outside our beach cottage. Three men got out lugging a bushel basket and began having a heated debate in another language. Sensing they were from out of town, I shouted from our deck, “You folks need some help?”

  One man spoke a bit of English, and he explained they were Korean businessmen who had just returned from a chartered crabbing trip. He opened the bushel basket, revealing layer upon layer of beautiful, gurgling, blue crabs. He told us they were staying in a hotel, and unless we wanted to take the crabs off their hands, they were headed to the beach to release them.

  On one hand, it would have been hilarious to watch the three well-intentioned tourists inadvertently cause utter mayhem by emptying a bushel basket of vicious crabs amongst the sunbathers at the beach. On the other hand, it’s not every day that someone walks up to your deck, where you are sitting comfortably with drink in hand, and offers you sixty-bucks-worth of fresh-caught seafood for free.

  Needless to say, we took the crabs off their hands, because that’s the kind of generous Americans we are. Bowing and waving, they thanked us profusely for helping them out, and we shamelessly accepted their misplaced gratitude.

  As the rental car pulled away, we—Tray, Jacq, Maz, Francis and I—looked blankly at each other. Our crabbing ventures had never netted a catch this size, and we all wondered just how we would manage crab preparation on a large scale.

  “Okay,” Tray finally said, “Let’s get started cooking these things!”

  Jacq found a can of Old Bay Seasoning in our spice cabinet and read from the back of the container. “Says here, fill the bottom of the pot with equal parts water and vinegar, bring to a boil, then layer the crabs in the steamer with seasoning. Cover and steam twenty to thirty minutes until the crabs turn red.”

  Piece of cake, we thought. As we readied our ingredients, we clinked our beers in mutual admiration of our ingenuity. We knew we were not like all the other beach tourists. We had a beach house and a steamer pot. We cooked our own crabs. We were practically as good as locals.

  “Water’s boiling!” Maz yelped, and Tray retrieved the basket of crabs from our deck, where the kids were poking them with sticks and watching them snap. As the rest of us huddled at a safe distance, Tray picked up the angry crabs with tongs and lowered them, one by one, into the deadly steam.

  The kids looked on, confused. Like most kids, they loved animals, and they loved food. But they did not often witness the ruthless conversion from one to the other. Poking the crabs with sticks was one thing. Cooking them alive was another.

  “It’s not going to hurt, is it?” Lilly asked.

  “Oh, no, they think they’re taking a nice bath,” Maz lied.

  Just then, a crab leapt from the pot in a desperate fight for survival—or escape from his soothing final bath. As the escapee scrambled sideways toward us, Francis emitted a girlish squeal and knocked me out of the way to get onto a barstool. The kids wailed and dug their nails into each other, while Maz sprang spryly onto the couch. The rest is a little foggy, but two minutes later, our kitchen broom was broken in half, two kids were crying, I had a mysterious scratch on my shoulder, and the escaped crustacean was back in the pot.

  Thankfully, the neighbors did not report the commotion to the local police. Despite the brouhaha, the crabs were steamed to perfection. Our mouths watered in anticipation of what would surely be a quintessential summer vacation meal.

  We piled the hot crabs in the center of our newspaper-covered table and surrounded the pile with lemon wedges and bowls of melted butter. We trustingly gave each kid a wooden mallet and turned them loose on the steamed crabs. We reminded them how to crack the crabs to get to the meat, not bothering to identify unappetizing parts like gills, intestines, and genitals. Regardless of the arguably revolting nature of crab cracking and picking, the kids were so caught up in the fun of pounding their mallets, they didn’t notice. With each strike, the kids squealed as shell fragments flew and crab juice squirted.

  For at least two hours, the eleven of us hammered and cracked, plucked and dipped, until every morsel of crab meat from that gift bushel had been extracted and consumed.

  “I am exhausted!” Francis exclaimed once all the crabs were picked and eaten.

  “Well, I hope you’re not too tired of picking,” I replied, “because you’ll have to pick a place to order pizza when everyone starts complaining that they’re still hungry.”

  SEASON 2 EPISODE 6

  THANKSGIVING’S FORBIDDEN FRUIT

  Every Thanksgiving, Francis announces proudly that the stuffing was his favorite part of the meal. Invariably, Anna loved the sweet potatoes, and Lilly went gaga over the mashed potatoes. Hayden couldn’t get enough of the turkey.

  But I was usually too embarrassed to admit my favorite Thanksgiving dish. Ever since I was a kid, I didn’t do cartwheels over eating turkey. I didn’t drool over the mashed potatoes or my father’s giblet gravy. I didn’t love, or even like for that matter, those miniature pickles and whatnots on my mother’s sectioned relish tray. I thought the stuffing had too many unidentifiable objects in it to be palatable, and I wouldn’t even touch a yam, candied or otherwise. Believe it or not, I never got jazzed up about the pumpkin pie, even with a humongous dollop of Cool Whip.

&nbs
p; My favorite part of my family’s Thanksgiving meal was the one that sat in a little pressed glass dish at the corner of the dining table. It didn’t require much preparation, but it was an essential part of our feast that I looked forward to every year: canned cranberry sauce.

  In the seventies, my family ate everything out of cans. Peas, corn, fruit juice, grapefruit sections, ham, chow mein, beef stew, liverwurst, even chocolate syrup. We celebrated ingenious cooking short cuts, including processed meats, flavored gelatin, and mini marshmallows. Back then, canned cranberry sauce was downright trendy in our neighborhood. And delicious.

  When I was old enough to use the can opener, my mother let me prepare the cranberries for our Thanksgiving meal. After I released the suction and pried off the lid, the jellied cylinder would slide right out onto the pressed glass dish with a pleasing little plop, perfectly intact and still showing the ridged impressions of the can. Using a table knife, I’d slowly carve the rounded mold into uniform disks that wiggled as I carried them to the table.

  The smooth, translucent slices glowed like rubies in the candlelight refracting through the glass dish. We passed it around like a cherished chalice, delving delicate slices of sweet tanginess with a silver spoon.

  Back then, a can of cranberry sauce cost less than a quarter, but it tasted divine. A plate of traditional fare—turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes and corn—was most definitely refined by a slice of glimmering cranberry sauce. It gave our Thanksgiving dinner elevated status and made it seem gourmet, fancy, high-class.

  After marrying Francis and sharing Thanksgiving dinners with military friends from all over, I found out not everyone shares my taste for canned cranberry sauce.

  “You make your own cranberry sauce, right?” friends would ask.

  And to save face, I would lie. “Oh, of course! I always make cranberry sauce from scratch, you know, with the real cranberries and, uh … the sugar and … uh, what’s that other ingredient?”

  Even though I’ve learned how to make cranberry sauce from scratch, I never let a Thanksgiving go by without sneaking a smack of my beloved canned version, and I’ve passed the task of plopping and slicing on to my children. To me, canned cranberry sauce represents an edible virtue, a life lesson, a sweet reminder that no matter how times or circumstances change, I should always be myself.

  SEASON 2 EPISODE 7

  WANTED: MOM MANAGER

  I was late for the meeting as usual.

  With an armful of crumpled papers, I rushed down the hall. Sheepishly, I found a seat at the table, and began with as much authority as I could muster:

  “This meeting is called to order at, let’s see, twelve minutes after nine. If you don’t mind, I’d prefer that these weekly sessions start promptly at the top of the hour. Now, without further delay, let’s get down to business.”

  “The van still needs new brakes, and if you wait much longer, you’ll be paying for rotors too. You volunteered to bring snacks to Hayden’s flag football game on Tuesday at 3:15, but you must somehow get Lilly to the dentist at four o’clock. The checkbook hasn’t been balanced in three months, which might explain why you bounced a check last week,” I continued.

  “Francis is on his last pair of clean underwear, so please put a load of hot whites in at your earliest convenience. Moby is due for his monthly flea and tick medication. You have two articles due this week. The repairman is coming on Thursday between eight and two to fix the fridge. And you need to get serious about that juice cleanse. Now, how do you plan to get all that done?” I finished and took a slurp of coffee.

  Crickets.

  No one responded because I was having my weekly meeting with myself, and as usual I had no idea how to answer my own demands. I scribbled a to-do list, marked a few things on the calendar, and then went about my day, determined to get it all done once and for all.

  But deep inside, I knew the inevitable pattern of my life would repeat itself. My week would start out productive. Something would throw me off track—a car repair, a sick kid, writer’s block. One item on my list would collide into the next, and the ensuing pile up would become overwhelming.

  By Friday, Francis would come home from work to find no dinner, unfolded laundry heaped on the coffee table, and me, dazed and unshowered, draped over my computer chair where I’d been surfing vintage ceramic Christmas trees on eBay for three hours.

  What fundamental flaw in my character made it so difficult for me to keep up with my responsibilities as a mom?

  After some thought, fueled by half a box of Cheese Nips, I realized I have always been a soldier, not a commander. A worker bee, not the queen. I’m not lazy. I’m not incompetent. I’m not disorganized. I just need a supervisor, a boss, a manager to watch over me and keep me on track.

  Ahh, how different things would be with someone to offer clear direction and guidance.

  “Ms. Molinari,” my manager might say, “While it is clear that you are no stranger to hard work, there is room for improvement in the areas of task prioritization, self-motivation, and personal hygiene. It is my recommendation that you avoid distractions from your daily priorities such as online shopping, free samples, and midday reruns of Lost.”

  But unless I found a manager willing to be compensated in meatloaf, I couldn’t afford to pay someone to give me direction and motivation.

  I am the manager, damn it, and I have to take responsibility, I thought. Even if it feels like I’m being dragged through life behind my dirty white minivan, I’ll continue this never-ending game of catch-up until the job is done. I’ll try to avoid getting tangled in the particulars—the emails, the dust bunnies, the bills, the burnt dinners, the dark roots—and focus on the big picture: keeping our family happy and healthy.

  Fortunately, long-term analysis indicated the family was on an upward trend. Subordinates still complained from time to time, but overall they reported excellent workplace satisfaction. As manager, I sometimes lacked efficiency, but I made it up in dedication, sincerity, and willingness to work overtime and on weekends without pay.

  Despite its flaws, our family business was thriving, so I could see no immediate need for new management.

  Meeting adjourned.

  SEASON 2 EPISODE 8

  HOW MANY IDIOTS DOES IT TAKE TO FILL OUT A 1040?

  “Oh crud, we need to do our taxes,” I groaned to Francis, as I did every April.

  After exhausting every reason to procrastinate—cleaning out the crisper drawer in the fridge, perusing old Hickory Farms catalogs left over from Christmas, clipping toenails, surfing eBay for vintage bar signs, and napping—it’s finally time to face the music.

  Coffee and a folder of haphazardly collected paperwork in hand, Francis and I reluctantly plopped down in front of our computer to complete the dreaded annual tax forms.

  We haven’t had the best luck preparing our tax forms over the years and are conditioned to avoid the experience. Despite my law degree and Francis’s master’s degree in finance, we’ve always struggled to grasp the simple concepts relevant to our personal income tax forms.

  In law school, I took a tax law course and could write a scholarly paper on whether the federal income tax is a direct tax or an excise tax based on the Sixteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Pollock case. But somehow, I struggled with my 1040-EZ.

  Francis’s master’s thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School was titled “Congress, Defense, and the Deficit: An Analysis of the FY 1996 Budget Process in the 104th Congress,” but he couldn’t tell the difference between short- and long-term capital gains if his retirement pay depended on it.

  But still every year, we begrudgingly spread out our paperwork and somehow fulfill our annual obligation as taxpayers.

  For several years, we used TurboTax, a supposedly idiot-proof program that led us through a simplified series of questions designed to accurately calculate all income and deductions.

  Somehow, Francis and I were still totally confused.

  “Do we qualify
for the child tax credit?” I asked, as Francis slurped his coffee.

  “Heck if I know. Just do whatever we did last year. That seemed to work,” he said nonchalantly.

  “I forget, do we have Roth IRAs or regular IRAs?” I said a few minutes later. Rifling through a pile of papers, Francis found our statements, which might as well have been written in Chinese.

  “Roth, but what on earth is a ‘recharacterized contribution’?”

  My eyes started to cross as I tried to decipher our mutual fund papers. “Is ‘cost basis’ the same as ‘purchase price’?” I said, searching my faded memory bank.

  “I don’t know. Just punch in two hundred dollars and see what happens,” Francis suggested.

  After four hours, two pots of coffee, three calls to our financial manager, and at least a dozen choice expletives, we finally keyed all the numbers in and dutifully sent our forms off to Uncle Sam.

  We didn’t get our refund check for several weeks, but by then we’d already spent it and lost the receipt. When our bank statements arrived, we didn’t balance the checkbook. And we knew that by the following April, we’d be back in front of our computer, dazed and confused all over again.

  SEASON 2 EPISODE 9

  BIRDS, BEES, AND BRATS

  “Time for gelato!” I blurted, pulling our kids away from a statue at the Vatican Museum during a family trip to Rome. We had stopped on our way to the Sistine Chapel to take a closer look at the strange female sculpture we initially thought was covered in some kind of fruit. Were they mangoes?

  The plaque on the adjacent wall explained she was Artemis, the goddess of fertility, and she was adorned with severed bull testicles.

  Ahem.

  While stationed in Europe, Francis and I tried to expose Hayden, Anna, and Lilly to art, history, and culture as much as possible. This might qualify as overexposure.