"Mrs. Suzie Homemaker"--I am not.

I often think my mom taught me almost nothing about keeping house. She wanted her girls to have careers, and pay someone else to keep house.

But today, while reading through menu plans in the blogosphere, I realize that she *did* teach me about putting together a meal. She taught me that you have to consider every part of the meal, so that when you cook it, everything's ready to come to the table at the same time, for instance. (That means, for our house, that the scalloped potatoes need to be put in the oven half an hour or even an hour before the meatloaf, for them to be done at the same time.)

She taught me that a meal should have a variety of textures, colors, and flavors. So, for example, I almost never serve a whole plate of "white/beige food"--baked chicken slices or white fish, white rice or noodles, and cauliflower, for example. She would have had pimento mixed in with the rice or noodles, and a green vegetable instead of cauliflower, for example, and maybe even a sprig of parsley on the plate for a little pizazz. One way to add more color is to use a colorful starch: spinach noodles, bright-orange yams, peas, beets. (Yes, peas are starch. They do not count as green vegetables.)

She always tried to serve one green vegetable at dinner, whether it was broccoli, green beans, spinach, zucchini, or lettuce. (They didn't have fancy things like kale in the stores back then, I don't think, or maybe my dad wouldn't eat the stuff. She didn't like mustard greens or collards so she didn't serve those, either.) If the vegetables in the meal weren't green (think carrots or beets, which now I know are actually in the starch category), she'd do a salad on the side.

She wouldn't  have served creamed chicken or turkey or tuna with creamed spinach (not saying I've seen that combo in the menu plans today, but I've done it myself). Too much creaminess, not enough crunch. Vary textures, have something creamy, something chewy, something crunchy.

She tried to have a protein, a starch, and a vegetable to balance out the plate. (Protein was meat/fish/cheese/eggs/dried beans--I hate lima beans! ...but had to eat them; starch was pasta, rice, potatoes, peas, corn; vegetable was just about anything else that grew and I didn't like, at the time: tomatoes, green beans, spinach, lettuce, carrots, celery, sauerkraut, cabbage, red cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, etc.) There was always koolade at lunch (she was pretty healthy in her cooking, I don't know why she went for koolade and jello) and milk (half reconstituted powdered milk/half fresh milk) at dinner, oh, and at breakfast there was almost always orange juice (watered down, though I never realized it until I started buying it myself and making it according to the directions--three cans water to a can of juice concentrate).

She'd make a roast on Sunday and serve the meat for several days afterwards in many forms: open-faced hot sandwiches with gravy, creamed over toast or rice or noodles, and finally the last bits and pieces of meat stirred into Fried Rice, while the bone(s) would be simmered into soup.

Sometimes the grocery money wouldn't stretch far enough and after all the leftovers were eaten up earlier in the week, there'd be pancakes for supper. She made it an occasion, a celebration, never letting on that there were pancakes because all there was in the house was flour, sugar, milk and a few eggs. My parents bought flour and sugar and powdered milk  in bulk--in 25 or 50lb bags, I think. I remember they kept the stuff in huge tin containers.

I may not be very good at cleaning and organizing, but I find I know more than I thought I did, at least when it comes to cooking.

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