While pondering the age old question, 'what's for supper?', my mind traveled back to a time when I was about 7 years old.....many, many moons ago.
Mother had to have some kind of surgery on her foot and the hospital was at least an hours drive from home. This was long before the days of out patient surgery where they slice, dice, staple and send you home. This surgery required a three day stay.
A three day stay meant that Dad and I would be on our own. Being the WAY youngest of three, sisters Lela and Blanche had already left the nest. Dad had to work and I was in school so there was no time for running back and forth to visit Mother.
At the tender age of seven and not having a worry in the world, I thought this sounded like a great adventure. My first quest was to sleep in the folks bed.
The first night I realized that my dad snored. He did not just snore, he raised the roof completely off the house. I tried everything I could think of to block out the noise. I put my fingers in my ears, that didn't work. I wrapped the pillow around my head, but the sound of fifteen chainsaws made its way through the feathers. I finally gave up and went to my own room.
The second night, I had a plan. I would go to bed and hour early. Dad probably thought that was pretty funny since getting me to go to bed on a school night was like pulling teeth. I slammed my eyes shut and summoned sleep, but it was not to be. I went back to my own room again and the third night I didn't even try.
During our three day hiatus, Dad had to cook. This was something I had never seen him do. He brought out the sandwich grill and began to rummage through the pantry and the frig. Mom's sandwich grill was long before the days of George Foreman. It had a pair of flat steel plates, absolutely no non-stick coating and boy oh boy, did that thing get hot. This must have been a high tech appliance, back in the day, because it also had a pair of waffle plates. I saw Mother use them once......I also saw her chiseling burnt waffles out of those plates with a screwdriver.
Dad gathered all the ingredients he could find and set about to concoct something for supper. He had bread, butter, peanut butter and hot dogs. I can remember laughing and him assuring me that it would be the best sandwich ever. He sliced the hot dogs lengthwise and placed them inside the peanut butter sandwiches, buttered the outside of the bread and tossed them on the grill. We ate them for three days and to this day, it's one of my favorite sandwiches. It was a Saturday morning when we went to get Mother from the hospital. We left an hour early and stopped at a hamburger joint called Sandy's. I think we each had five burgers, poor Dad, he must have been about starved to death.
Although my husband does not share some of my culinary delights, I'm thinking grilled hot dog and peanut butter sandwiches might be the answer for the age old question.
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