How eating habits have changed. As kids, we had to eat everything on the plate, could not leave the table until we had eaten everything and couldn’t leave the table until Dad had finished or permitted us to leave. No elbows on the table, knife and fork placed together when finished, no talking while there was food in your mouth and definitely no licking the cutlery or shock horror – the plate?
I have been mentally scarred all my life over a couple of those requirements. I always eat everything on my plate whether I like it or not and not being hungry is irrelevant. I still eat everything.
To this day, I always eat the stuff I least like on the plate first, so I have something to look forward to at the end, which was a self-designed strategy as a young child so I wasn’t left stuck at the table crying like my brother, who always ate the good stuff first and got stalled at the table trying to get out of eating his broccoli or some other disgusting boiled green thing?
Then there was the stuff we consumed. Chokos – another disgusting green thing that Dad used to make us eat as a vegetable and then also try and trick me into eating it as a desert because when you boiled it, it looked and tasted like a pear, but to this day I still won’t eat pears as it could be a choko.
While choko was public enemy number one on my list of hated food, closely following were, smoked cod (beautiful orange looking fish) and onion cream sauce, lambs fry and bacon in gravy, which was like eating the sole of my shoe, but at least the gravy helped it go down, and closely followed by rice pudding?
Then there were the meals Mum cooked that I looked forward to on special occasions, which looking at these days is a bit of a turnaround. Beef was our staple diet, chicken or turkey on special occasions (had to erase the chook’s name from my memory as it had previously been running around in the backyard) or on really special occasions, Mooloolaba prawns.
I miss Mum daily, but I miss her corned beef fritters nearly as much and could have happily eat them every day. I suppose at least these days I can lick the knife without fear of retribution.
