The morning is cloudy and damp. Light rain is predicted for most of the day though the sun seems to belie that. It broke through a short while ago. It is 53°. Yesterday I got registered for the dump. Give me an amen!! I went there and emptied my car of boxes and papers. Today I’ll load the car with trash bags and make another dump run. It will take more than a few trips to get rid of all the bags especially the really heavy bags I can’t lift. Those I’ll drag, a technique I’ve used often.

When I was a kid, I never cooked or baked. My mother did it all. I made sandwiches, my culinary delights. My favorite sandwiches were bologna sandwiches. My mother bought bologna in a roll which had to be cut into slices. My knife skills weren’t so great so my slices were odd, thin at one end and thick at the other. Luckily, the white bread was so pliable it molded itself around each end. I added mustard, plain old yellow mustard. My second favorite sandwich was a flutternutter. I made it with smooth peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff. The brand of peanut butter didn’t matter. The Marshmallow Fluff did. It could only be fluff, never Marshmallow Cream. The difficult part of eating that sandwich was it oozed out of the sides. I never did find the perfect proportions.

My grandfather always ate his toast burned on purpose. I later found out the reason. My grandfather’s family had little money. His father had been murdered. His mother had to work. He and his sisters used to walk the train tracks to collect coal pieces which had fallen off the train. One of his sisters took care of them while his mother worked. There were no pop up toasters. On the toasters back then, the bread was loaded on two sides of the toaster where the coils were. Once one side was browned, you had to turn the bread to toast the other side. If you didn’t watch it for even the shortest time, the bread burned on one side. For my grandfather it was his usual breakfast, burned toast. It became comfort food.

Every morning in Ghana, I had the same breakfast, two eggs, coffee and toast. The food was cooked on a charcoal burner. My stove had no gas. The burner resembled a hibachi. A lot of fan action was necessary to get the coal burning exactly right. The eggs were cooked in peanut oil. They were delicious. The bread was toasted by putting it on the sides of the burner. You had to remember to turn the bread or it burned. My grandfather would have been delighted.

This entry was posted on April 17, 2026 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.