Remembering Mom’s Home Cooking

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.

Meister Eckhart

In 1968 when several friends and I decided to hike the Wonderland Trail around Mt. Rainier to celebrate our graduation from high school, I volunteered to plan and prepare all of the food for the trip. That meant planning, shopping, and packing lightweight food for five girls for ten days, a daunting task. What I meant of course when I made the offer is that my mother would plan and prepare all of the food for the trip. Fortunately she did not seem to mind at all and even seemed to relish the opportunity. For several days our kitchen table was covered with assorted plastic bags, a canister of cocoa powder, oatmeal, powdered milk, sugar, peanut butter, and assorted crackers, candy bars, and peanuts for lunches.

I did not simply relegate the task to my mother, however eager she might have been to take on the job. I helped with every part of it and in the process learned how to do what my mother had done quite well for much of her life and with much love. . . packing food for a camping trip.

In the 1960’s there were no convenient packets of oatmeal and cocoa, no Zip-Loc bags. Freeze dried food mostly had to be purchased in bulk and turned into a meal on the trail by adding pasta, rice, seasoning, and dried meat or something called textured vegetable protein, the precursor of today’s soy based vegetarian products.

My mother’s goal had always been to make meal production on the trail as quick and simple as possible, which meant that ingredients had to be mixed up at home and proportioned for individual meals. We carefully measured out cocoa powder, powdered milk, and sugar so that a cup of hot chocolate could be easily mixed simply by adding boiling water to the cup. The brown canister of Hershey’s Cocoa is probably identical to the one you now have sitting in your pantry, and the recipe on the label is the same one we used fifty-six years ago, minus the vanilla. We did the same with quick cooking oatmeal, though it had to sit for awhile after adding the water to soften and cook the oats, which meant that on cold mornings it had sometimes cooled off before we were able to eat it unless we wanted chewy oatmeal. No matter. It was edible, sweet, and filling. That was all we needed to start a day on the trail.

What? No Zip-Loc bags? This too had a solution. Long before anyone had heard of nanoplastics or single use plastic bags, long before there was recycling and it was fashionable to do so, my mother carefully saved every plastic bag she obtained at the grocery store, usually from the produce aisle, but bread was then packaged in plastic bags that were stronger than the ones that held produce. She would rinse them and reuse them and after each use would hang them on the clothesline to dry. The idea of buying plastic bags seemed ludicrous. We had all the bags we needed, and they were free and used over and over again until they developed tears.

In many ways it was a simpler world in 1968, though the monumental task of preparing food in this manner was extremely time consuming, hardly simple, and in the 1970’s when packets of cocoa mix and oatmeal became available I was glad to dispense with all that measuring and packing.

Now packing food for a backpacking trip is fairly simple. I toss in packets of oatmeal, teabags, freeze dried dinners, and snacks for lunches. All of it goes into my bear canister. The job is done. Why did I think that things were simpler in 1968?

I stopped rinsing out and reusing plastic bags in the 1970’s when Baggies became available with their wire twisty ties. I gradually shifted to much improved freeze dried dinners, which could be prepared in their foil packets. Like almost everything I consumed on the trail, it was a matter of just adding water. And in truth I was glad to spend less time in camp preparing a meal and more time savoring my surroundings.

Like many teenage girls I did not get along particularly well with my mother during those days. But sitting at the kitchen table measuring powdered milk and sugar were satisfying times. Nevertheless, by the time I had graduated from high school I wanted out of there, to move into the dorm, to get on with my life without my mother telling me how I should wear my hair.

What I did not know is that the food in the campus cafeteria was simply awful. I remember that the chicken was rubbery and dry, always served on Friday nights when I had just finished with anatomy lab. It always reminded of whatever I had just dissected in the lab. To ease my transition to college life my mother bought me a Hot Pot that plugged in and heated water to boiling. When I was home on visits she gave me small plastic bags full of hot chocolate mix and oatmeal. When I was done with these treats I hung the plastic bags from my dorm room window. Yes, life was much simpler in those days.