"I'm Boiling a Tongue"

Disclaimer: My mother, Dot, is actually a very good cook -- in fact, she makes the best scrambled eggs ever -- but sometimes she has some SCARY food ideas. Here are just three:

We always dreaded a special occasion, because these inevitable words would come out of my mother's mouth, "Dad got a raise, so I'm boiling a tongue." You could smell it a block away. Not only would there be a huge cow's tongue coiled inside of a pot of boiling water, but she would stud it with cloves. CLOVES! I still can't go near those orange pomander balls at Christmas time. Actually, tongue is very delicious, but it's best eaten with your eyes closed.

Dot is anemic, so we ate a LOT of liver. I loved the onions that went with it, but it was hard choking down that liver. We ate so much liver that we used to collect the "liver lids" and use them to make home-made "Shrinky-Dinks" (for those of you who don't eat organ meat, liver comes in a little tub with a clear plastic lid).

My mother is best known for her "butter sandwiches." After making school lunches for nine kids and five foster kids every day, you can quickly figure out why. The sandwiches consisted of two pieces of white bread and one pat of butter (Butter? Who am I kidding? It was margarine, or "Oleo" as Dot likes to say). The margarine was always straight out of the fridge, so it couldn't be spread at all. It was just a square of solidified vegetable oil in the middle of the bread. So lunch time usually went something like this -- bite bread, bite bread, bite bread, bite a HUGE CHUNK OF MARGARINE, gag, try not to throw up, bite bread, bite bread, bite bread. Needless to say, I quickly got a job in the school cafeteria and ate school lunch everyday.