I was a bit different as a kid. I mean compared to other children. I preferred meat, fruit and even some vegetables to desserts. I know that might sound a bit strange to most parents. My preferences might have been tied to the reality that my mother fed me baby foods until I was about twenty-eight. As I reconsider it, the folks at Gerber didn’t produce a pureed version of German chocolate cake.
I also ate very little candy. On Halloween, I would come home from trick or treat, and my mother and I would sit on the floor sorting my take for the evening. We would sort my collection into three piles. I didn’t really get to assign anything to a particular pile; I was mostly an observer in the annual ritual. Into one of those piles would go everything that was made by the generous Mrs. Robertson. Those went straight into the garbage, because Mom was sure that Mrs. Robertson let her fourteen cats walk all over the kitchen counters. The second pile contained a couple of apples and a small box of raisins. That was the pile I ended the night consuming. I can’t say for certain what happened to the third grouping–the one that contained all the candy, the caramel apples and the popcorn balls. As soon as the sorting was finished, my mom hastily took those into my parent’s bedroom. They never again appeared. My only tastes of candy came when I visited my one pair of grandparents. (My other grandparents only tried to give me buttermilk. I resent cows to this day.)
In defense of my mother, I believe that this sort of behavior is taught in the top secret motherhood school. I know this because my wife exhibited the same behavior with our son on Halloween that my mother employed. That was typically followed by a couple weeks of repeated, “Do I look fat to you?” It didn’t take me long to realize that such a question demands a very rapid response; one should not even pause for a breath.
At twenty-nine, just as I was beginning to learn that meat, vegetables and applesauce do not have identical textures in their natural states, I discovered dessert in the form of a gourmet cheesecake. Well, I guess it really wasn’t gourmet. It came from a discount food warehouse, in a flimsy box with a cellophane peep hole that revealed the only attractive portion of the product. Remember that my taste buds had been accustomed to the miracle recipes of the baby food makers. To me, the cheesecake was the definition of heaven.
Some years later, as I went through my gastronomical adolescence, my recreational use of foods helped me to realize that cheesecake didn’t really taste like cardboard, as my first experience had led me to believe. In addition, I discovered that cheesecake, the wonder food, actually comes in lots of different flavors.
Dessert is now my favorite time of day. My favorite way to complete a nutritious mean of two jars of beef, two jars of mashed peas and a pureed apple with cinnamon is with a slice of turtle cheesecake. But please don’t tell my mother; she’ll just take it from me.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the foggiest notion of how to go about actually making a cheesecake. If you have a recipe for one that doesn’t involve using either a mixer or an oven, please let me know. I can operate a blender, though, since I took notes while my mother prepared the Christmas ham one year.
Author’s note: I may have taken some creative liberties with slight exaggerations here and there, but I’m not concerned about being caught. My mother is still not sure what the Internet is.