blogger profile

Hope Elizabeth

consultant / teacher

A long and windy road, with lots of backtracking has lead me to where I am now. I grew up on a dirt road in the middle of the woods in South Alabama. I attended the same small school from kindergarten through 12th grade. Perfect student, perfect child. Went to college about 30 miles away from home a...

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Grammy's Cooking

Not your typical grandmotherly fare

This week we are saying goodbye to my grandmother. And some of us are celebrating her life and all the hilarious memories we have of her. Grammy was, to put it mildly, quirky. You never knew what she was going to say or do (especially after her stroke when all inhibitions she might have had flew out the window, but that is another topic.) 

My grandmother will live in infamy as “The grandmother who couldn’t cook.” People talk all the time about the wonderful cookies or cakes or dressing or fried chicken that they remember their grandmothers cooking. I tell them that we remember the disasters that Grammy cooked, and they look at me in disbelief, “A grandmother who can’t cook? That’s unheard of!” 

Growing up during the depression, she got used to saving every little scrap. She would ‘cook’ a casserole or freeze some peas from the garden, and upon finding them at the bottom of her deep freeze 10 years later proclaim, “This has been frozen so I’m sure it is still good.” Then she would proceed into the kitchen to thaw it out and heat it up for the relatives visiting from out of town. As far as I know, none of them ever got sick, but that could be because they only ate a few bites and survived on the ice cream my grandfather brought out after every meal (and sometimes for an in between meal snack!)

 My aunt Patsy retold one of my favorite stories yesterday. Her husband, my uncle Roddie (one of Grammy’s sons), loved banana pudding, so Grammy would always try to be sure and make some for him when he visited from Mississippi. Now, Grammy was very imaginative and one of her bits of kitchen “wisdom” was that if you are cooking and find that you are missing an ingredient, just substitute something else (another trick from the Depression, I think. Plus they lived 15 miles from the nearest grocery store so she couldn’t just send someone out to grab it really quickly!) Sounds reasonable, right? Not with Grammy’s inventiveness. Anyway, he and his family were over visiting one day, so she decided to make banana pudding (keep in mind her penchant for saving everything.) It started going downhill right away. She didn’t have any bananas, so she decided to use chocolate pudding instead. Then she didn’t have any vanilla wafers, but that did not deter her. You see, she had several grandchildren who would lick the icing from the inside of oreo cookies, then leave the cookie part lying around. She would gather them up in case someone wanted a cookie later, so she decided to use those in place of the vanilla wafers. Unfortunately, she still didn’t have enough cookies, so she decided to use the next best thing that she had on hand, shredded wheat cereal. After dinner that day, she dished out the pudding for desert. My grandfather took one bight and said, “Florine, what is this?” She proudly proclaimed, “It’s banana pudding, Roddie’s favorite!”

I’m really going to miss Grammy, but I know that when I think of her the only tears will be the ones streaming down my face from laughing so hard. She would want it that way. And in her honor, I am going to try to recreate her “banana pudding” recipe for any of you brave and imaginative cooks out there.

 Grammy’s “Banana” Pudding

Ingredients:

1 large box of instant chocolate pudding mix

About 12-15 oreo cookie halves with the icing licked off by young kids who have just come in from outside and not bothered to wash their hands

About 1/2 – 1 cup of Shredded Wheat cereal (or Kicks cereal, an acceptable substitution if you are out of Shredded Wheat)

Directions:

1. Using the instructions on the box as general guidelines, mix up the pudding making substitutions as needed.
2. Place a layer of oreo halves and shredded wheat along the bottom of your pan.
3. Pour the pudding on top, then garnish with a few more oreo halves and shredded wheat crumbs.
4. If you have any leftovers, store them in the refrigerator for a week or so, or put in the deep freeze indefinitely (be sure to label it clearly so you can find it again in a few years when you are looking for it.)