Chicken a’la potato chips and other gastronomic tragedies.

By Sandi Amorello

I will start out here by saying that just because you are grief-stricken does not mean you have lost your taste buds.  Incessant crying and extraordinary sadness may dampen your appetite, but not your ability to differentiate good food from bad food.

When your husband dies, people want to be helpful.  I don’t want to sound ungrateful, although I most likely will…but I just need to say something.  If you know a woman whose husband has died, and you would like to help out by providing food for herself and her three young, grief-stricken children in the first few months of their loss…by all means, do it.  But put some thought into it.  I beg of you.  If you’re going to do it, put a bit of effort into it.

In the months following Drew’s death, my two oldest children were in 1st and 4th grade. It was a lovely surprise when I got calls from both sets of “room mothers” that each class had a plan to provide us with dinners once or twice a week for the next few months. I was overcome with emotion and gratitude.  I thought “how lovely…how thoughtful…what a nice break for me.  I won’t have to cry AND cook every single night.”  I had about had it with multitasking.

Now, class number one brought us dinners prepared by a different family (i.e. the mom!) each week.  Class number two decided to collect money from the parents of the children in the classroom and to use that money to buy whatever take-out food we requested.  Some weeks we’d ask for pizza…other weeks we’d ask for Chinese or Thai…and other weeks we’d get lasagna and salad from the little gourmet Italian deli in town.  After months of palatable take out food, there was actually still money left over (wow…those were generous parents!) and the class mother told me she’d use it to buy us a gift certificate to our favorite local restaurant so we could get yet more take out over the summer.

In contrast, class number one had parents dropping off dinners that were sometimes hard to recognize and, sadly, often ended up in the disposal.  People tried. Well, some of them tried.    We were gifted with casseroles, casseroles and more casseroles.  In a blatant act of defiance, one mother brought us about 18 pounds of American Chop Suey.  This was after I had told her neither my children nor I liked American Chop Suey.  One woman brought us what were apparently the leftovers from a dinner she and her husband and three kids had eaten earlier that evening.  A bag of frozen corn.  A paper plate covered with foil that concealed strips of chicken coated in some sort of crushed up potato chip mixture… topped off by a few slices of a jelly roll from the local grocery store for dessert.  This was not even a whole jelly roll in some sort of box or packaging…this was four slivers of jelly roll…on another paper plate…covered with it’s own foil.  The final blow came when I was at the local grocery store a few days later and spotted a display of the aforementioned jellyrolls.  A jellyroll in it’s entirely was about $2.50.  Now, I don’t want to sound ungrateful or judgmental, but these people were not poor.  This was disturbing on a variety of levels.  One being that our four slivers of jellyroll cost them about 95 cents…. the second being that the main ingredient on the jellyroll label was hydrogenated oil.  Were these people trying to kill off the rest of my family, too?

One night we did get a great meal. One parent actually owned a restaurant.  His wife made us some sort of stew and a strudel.  Even though she had apparently forgotten to add the sugar to the strudel mixture, it was okay.  I mean, at least they really put forth some effort.  If I recall, they even dropped off a bouquet of flowers with the meal.  No one ever brought me a bottle of wine though.  Huh.  If I ever know anyone who is widowed and is trapped at home with three kids…the first thing I would bring her would be a bottle of sauvignon blanc, a huge bunch of flowers, a chocolate fudge cake, and maybe a gift certificate for a massage…and an offer to baby-sit…and a pizza for the kids.  Leave the hydrogenated jellyrolls and frozen corn at home.  Please.

p.s.  Not to be completely insensitive….but class number one could have learned a few things from class number two.

p.p.s.  I forgot to mention the 27 loaves of banana bread.

© 2007 Sandi Amorello/Silver Crayon Studios, Inc.  All rights reserved.
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