Sunday Dinner, January 25, 2009

As usual I spent a big chunk of time considering my options for Sunday Dinner this week. I finally made up my mind and now I just have to put it into action.

I'm making a big pot of pinto beans with ham tonight. When I get home from church tomorrow afternoon I'll put the beans on to warm while I peel some potatoes to fry and make either HOMEMADE BUTTERMILK BISCUITS, A SKILLET OF MY BUTTERMILK CORNBREAD or a SKILLET OF MY PANBREAD.

Or some combination of 2 of those things. One skillet of cornbread or panbread is never enough when I have a crowd for Sunday Dinner so I have to make at least 2 iron skillets of some kind of bread.

What's on the menu at your place? Share your plans/menu in the comments.My menu for Sunday Dinner is a typical meal from when I was growing up here in Northeast Arkansas. My daddy worked at the Singer furniture factory in Trumann, or Ma Singer as it was affectionately or sarcastically called, according to your inflection at the time.

The only time Daddy brought home more than $1oo for 40 hours work was when he was able to put in some overtime. We were blessed to have pinto beans and fried potatoes and some kind of bread for a meal most days of the week. Occasionally Mama would have enough money for us to have some salt pork, fried chicken or some other bit of meat to accompany our beans and taters.

For a change sometimes we'd have white beans, dried blackeyed peas or dried white lima beans instead of pinto beans. Instead of fried potatoes we'd have stewed potatoes, mashed potatoes or potato salad, but not very often.

MAMA'S HOMEMADE BUTTERMILK BISCUITS accompanied almost every meal but occasionally Mama would make an iron skillet of CORNBREAD or PANBREAD instead of biscuits. Daddy hated light bread except for a sandwich, and he wasn't overly fond of sandwiches. He preferred hot meals and Mama almost every meal. It was rare for us to have a sandwich for a meal until after Daddy retired from the Singer factory.

Daddy loved fried bacon and fried salt pork, or salt meat as we call it, and his favorite meal was one of those meats, homemade cream gravy and hot homemade biscuits. I've sat down many times to gravy and biscuits for a meal, and in leaner times the gravy and the biscuits were made with water because we couldn't afford milk and buttermilk at the time.We had homemade pancakes for supper tonight and I had only a small amount of pancake syrup left in the bottle. I left most of the pancake syrup for Lamar's pancakes and only took a bit for myself.

I used some light corn syrup along with that dab of pancake syrup on my pancakes, and can I say, "Eh."

Not the best thing I've ever eaten, but it stopped the hunger pangs for a while.

But it just made me think about how much less we had when I was growing up. It makes me a little ashamed of myself that I was whining a little that I didn't have enough pancake syrup and had to make do when there are so many people in the world who have so much less.

I am blessed, but perhaps more importantly, I am spoiled, and our nation as a whole is spoiled for the most part. I'm afraid this recession (dare I say, "depression?") is going to force many of us to tighten our belts and look for ways to make do with what we have and stretch our resources to make them go farther.

I'm already pretty frugal but there are always more things we can do to reduce, reuse, recycle and use up what we have without buying more.It's nearly 10 pm and I still have a lot to do tonight so I'm going to get this posted and wish everyone a blessed Sunday.

May God meet all your needs and may you have enough to share.