Mayonnaise and Mom

I have thought for a long time that I should include the topic of mayonnaise in my blog. Truly, in order to include it, I had to think about how mayonnaise became such a topic on my food brain. Well, I know where it started. It was because of my mother.

Mom loves a good burger. She doesn't make simple burgers in the sense that she won't make them unless she has all of the ingredients. One of the many meals that Mom always came back to, was the hamburger and frozen, crinkle cut fries. She would make her burger patties in advance and keep them on one of her Corelle plates, wrapped in plastic wrap in the fridge until it was almost time to eat. Meanwhile, she would prep her toppings- lettuce, tomato and onion. Please note that I do not remember her placing cheese on the burgers. She didn't spend much of her grocery budget on the bun, but she got the ones with sesame seeds on top. With fries in the oven, she would fire up her aluminum fry pan and get the burgers going. It usually took her a few batches to make burgers for all of us (some of us requested two patties).

She would leave the fries on the cookie sheet on top of the stove and you could serve yourself. I would grab my plate, with bun open and get my fries. At the kitchen table, she would have the veggies spread out on a couple of plates and condiments in the middle. Mom always, always reached for the mayonnaise first. Dad always, always commented on this. He would say something like, "Whoever heard of a hamburger with mayonnaise on it?" I have to admit. I was not a fan of the mayo option on a burger at first. It took me a while to try it. Not my brother. My brother always put mayonnaise on his, too. He was also ridiculed by my father for this bizarre condiment choice.

I finally got my nerve up to try mayonnaise on one of my burgers and I have never turned back. In fact, I no longer put ketchup or mustard on my homemade burgers. Only mayonnaise. Occasionally, the conversation regarding mayonnaise would escalate between my parents at the dinner table. Dad would continue telling her she was crazy and Mom would tell him that he doesn't appreciate Hellmann's Mayonnaise (Best Foods brand, West of the Rocky Mountains) because he grew up with Miracle Whip. I don't know if this is true. But Mom did the grocery shopping and you would never have seen a jar of Miracle Whip in the refrigerator at our house. I didn't even know what Miracle Whip was until I was at a friend's house in sixth grade. His mother told us we could make a sandwich and when asked what I would like on mine, I asked for mayonnaise and was handed the Miracle Whip jar. It didn't even look the same and I knew when I reached my knife into the jar, I was not getting mayonnaise. But I figured, "How bad could it be?" I have refused to eat the self-proclaimed "salad dressing" ever since.

Here is what happened in a nutshell. My mother created mayonnaise monsters. Honestly, sometimes I think my brother and I are the mayonnaise police. We often note at parties that someone has made potato salad or macaroni salad with Miracle Whip. These are not very miraculous salads. I beg of you, if you are someone who creates these salads, please warn me before I take a bite. Mom typically served mayonnaise-based salads if we were grilling out. In the summer months, since we were not in school, she would make a giant bowl of macaroni salad and leave it in the fridge for us to snack on. Usually, it was gone the next day. We craved mayonnaise.

I still only use real mayonnaise in my house and luckily I have found a partner who is on my side. His mother, too, has always used real mayonnaise. Recently, we were invited to a friends' house and she made deviled eggs. I love deviled eggs. I dove toward the tray and John grabbed my hand and said, "Uhhhh, Miracle Whip, trust me." I didn't know what to do. I already had one in my hand. I didn't want to be rude and put it back on the tray. I certainly didn't want to get up and throw it away. I decided to just eat the egg in one bite and deal with the consequences. I still cannot handle the taste. I want to, I do. I sometimes can be found buying the salads in the grocery deli department. They look so good in the container. I even go towards ones that say "Mustard Potato Salad," figuring that with all that mustard in there, maybe I won't taste the Miracle Whip. I usually end up taking a bite or two and throwing it away. John is probably smarter than me- he doesn't take a bite at all. I'm glad that he doesn't. I would have to question my relationship with anyone who has a different opinion than mine. I will never have Miracle Whip sitting next to my Hellmann's and I resent that I have to look at the "salad dressing" jars next to the mayonnaise at the grocery store. I cringe everytime.

I continue to make Mom's burgers, with lettuce, tomato, onion and mayonnaise. I even like dipping my fries in mayo. I have saved the recipe for chocolate cake on the back of my Hellman's label. Yes, mayonnaise in my chocolate cake, folks! You can sometimes hear my mother say things like, "Just add a scoop of mayo to the recipe, it makes it so much better!" My brother, on the other hand.... I think I have even seen him eat a hot dog with mayonnaise once.

Bagels & Cream Cheese and the Moschino Girls

While going to school in NYC, it always felt like I had the least amount of money out of everyone there. I showed up to school with my beaten up Levi jeans and a couple of worn out t-shirts. I worked two part-time jobs while at school and still couldn't afford to drop a dime on a new outfit. I remember someone saying to me, "I just love that you don't care. I love that you just dress that way and don't care what everyone else thinks of you." I didn't know what to think when they told me that. I remember being very upset about it for days and crying on Katy's shoulder about it. Katy always made me feel better about everyone at school.

My daily budget while at school was about $2.00. Mom would send me care packages with things like ramen noodles, macaroni and cheese, cans of tuna and soup. I used what was in the care package for dinners and spent my $2.00 on lunch. Usually, I would just get two cheeseburgers at McDonald's and wait to eat them until I got home so I could have a glass of water with them. Occasionally though, I woke up hungry. On my way to school I would be tempted by all of the carts of food on the street. I could manage to resist until I reached my destination and I would ultimately splurge on a hot chocolate and a plain bagel with cream cheese. Total- $2.00. It was .75 for a hot chocolate and $1.25 for bagel and cream cheese. This, to me, was the best deal in all of New York. The bagel was fresh and plump. If you have never had an NYC bagel, they slice their cream cheese from a giant slab and just give you the slice. I remember the cream cheese slice being about an inch deep and more than covered the surface of the bagel. Sometimes you would get more cream cheese than bagel. The hot chocolate, well, it was watery, but had a lot of sugar in it and did the trick for someone that didn't drink coffee at the time. The thing is, if I spent the $2.00 on the bagel and hot chocolate, I would know that I could not eat lunch. It was a trade-off and somehow I would justify this purchase until about 3pm when my stomach started growling and I would kill for something to eat to the point where I would wrestle someone to the ground for a Jolly Rancher. Sometimes I had a little bit more than $2.00 and I knew that I could buy something like a banana or apple at the deli on the corner to get me through lunch.

I would walk into class with my bagel in a paper bag and my hot chocolate in my hand. Now, there was a group of girls that always seemed to be dressed to be on a runway. I referred to them (and still do when talking to Katy), as the Moschino Girls. They didn't just have the Moschino belt or Moschino jeans, they had a closet full of Moschino and wore the outfits as they were shown in ads on the pages of Vogue magazine. Moschino is definitely one of the designers that I would think you would not want to wear head to toe, as it ends up coming out a little over-done. Especially at 8am on a Tuesday. But these girls never failed to show up wearing an outfit that costs a million dollars. I specifically remember one girl wearing an outfit one day that was all black. She had on a t-shirt; long, black coat; very tight, black pants that flared out at the bottom; boots with a very high heel; and a gigantic silver belt, with a buckle that was about a half foot wide and said MOSCHINO in capital letters. When she turned around, I saw that her outfit read MOSCHINO in white all down the back. Just when you thought she might be wearing another designer and was just dressed in all black. Nope. Moschino- all down the back of her jacket and jeans.

I remember the Moschino Girls huddling in a group and staring at me. In my t-shirt and Levi jeans. The looks they gave me were probably just them looking over the room, but to me, as insecure as I was back then, they looked like they thought I was the biggest idiot for not wearing designer clothes and eating a designer breakfast. They would share breakfasts that I could only dream of eating. One of them would bring beautiful chocolate croissants, another would have a beautiful platter of fruit and the other would bring individual bottles of juice with names I've never heard of before and extra fancy bottles of water. Surely all of this was purchased at a city deli, but to me, it seemed a little extravagant. Perhaps if I had more than two bucks to my name, I wouldn't have thought so. I definitely got used to making fun of the Moschino girls and couldn't wait to get to school to see what they were wearing. To this day, whenever I am eating a bagel with cream cheese, I imagine them looking over at me as if I was the scum of the Earth in my beat up clothes and cheap breakfast. I always thought it would have been fun to show up to class wearing Moschino like they did and then an hour into class, have a caterer show up to deliver a 7-course meal.