Oh How Rare

I never knew we were poor growing up. There were times that I somewhat suspicioned . After all, there are usually around seven of us that will in the years before my accident. My dad was a sheet-metal worker, a union man, and probably make decent money but something kids and seven kids. We lived on a farm, a small acreage, I've written about before about 15 acres in the final section. Part of it was pasture and part of the 15 acres was hay. We always had a good-sized garden some years better than others as far as yield went. Basically, we kids just didn't work the ground very well. I'm surprised my dad put up with us as long as he did. I wish I would've tried harder been a better son and pulled weeds, picked tomato worms and produced a garden my dad would have been been proud of. So we raised our food more or less. We slaughtered beef once a year and that fed us for the year.

We had this funky barbecue on wheels I don't know where it came from probably some garage sale or Paul's Main Auction. At least once a week through the summer we would have one cookout at least. I usually got the job of pulling out steaks from the freezer , neatly wrapped bundles of frozen meat for three or four steaks in each package. Pieces of meat so large they would have to be cut in half for the meal. There is no particular person who cooked steaks I know I got saddled with the job it seemed a lot. Mom would be in the house preparing salads and corn on the cob and whatever else we might have for dinner. Ideally dad would be on his way home as we cooked the meat. We wanted everything done before the milking of the cows if possible. We poor but we ate like kings. We just didn't know we were poor.

I am amazed at some of the frozen products I score at the food bank on Saturdays. I got some great bratwurst, Oscar Meyer hotdogs (chicken lips and chicken butts and I'm sure pork remnants), and a giant sack of cracked chicken breasts frozen rocksolid. I've been waiting all summer to use the the barbecue. I use the barbecue a couple times last year and did pretty good. I felt comfortable in you what I was doing. Well yesterday I took the bra off the barbecue fired it up to my pieces of meat on the grill one bratwurst package = 5, three frozen chicken breast thawed and half a pack of Oscar Meyer dogs. I was midly impressed when the grill took right off. I put all the burners down to “low” I figured this heat setting should be okay . The period of time is very short, I had to leave the area briefly to throw a the garbage I created. Smoke was coming out from underneath the grill . About five minutes later I got worried and a little nervous there was too much smoke and I can see flames through the little holes and cracks in the grill cover. I grabbed my stick push the top of the grill up and I cannot believe my eyes. The bratwurst and hot dogs were burned beyond recognition. The chicken looked as if it was not completely destroyed but it had its fair share of carbon. I'm so glad there is no one hanging around to witness this atrocity of protein. I quickly turned off the grill been collected the meat into the pan and brought waited briefly for the pan to cool enough to put the burnt offerings on my legs and slither away.

Somewhere in heaven, paradise or whatever my dad is laboring right now I'm sure he winced observing the amount of waste that created out of perfectly good protein. I'm sure I would've winced at I not gotten the protein from the food bank. I cannot figure what I did wrong but what I'm going to do sometime this week is to reenact the event with the last of the food bank food and see if I can pull this one off. Maybe I just needed to be humbled and the charrin of the food bank certainly did the trick.