Fried Bologna

I've been cooking a little more lately. I cooked every night for 3 or 4 nights in a row recently. That may be a record. Jim and I both prefer that Jim cook, but I am capable of cutting up an onion, deboning a chicken, and setting the table.

My mother cooked a lot. I like to think I'm following in her footsteps. I didn't say she was a good cook, but she did cook.

When I was in high school, we moved away from the town (Jonesboro) where I grew up. My mother would keep things like spices for decades. We had spices in tin containers that hadn't been sold in tin for 20 years. Long after we moved, when a food item was discovered at the back of the refrigerator, we'd joke that "it probably came from Jonesboro".

My mother was a school teacher by day and a piano teacher in the afternoons so putting dinner together usually happened after the last lesson around 6 pm. She never asked for any help and somehow always came up with something.

My favorites were:

Chicken ala King from the can on toast. I never knew that toast didn't have to be scraped before it was ready to eat. She regularly burned toast, but she'd always say it wasn't really burnt and scrape the "black" off the top. Voila!

Banquet chicken pot pies. At 500 calories and 50% saturated fat, these were quite tasty. I didn't know pot pies could be any better until Randi made Ina Garten's recipe once for us.

Wot-a-Burger. Occasionally, about 3 times a week, we'd eat out.

The only fruit I ever remember having around the house was a Saline watermelon and of course, circus peanuts. Fruit or nut? I can never remember. I always gave up watermelon for Lent. You Catholics will get that . . .

At least once a week we had fried bologna. She'd make four evenly spaced slits around the perimeter so it wouldn't bubble up, fry it on both sides and serve with a side dish of Bush's Baked Beans. Yummy.

I haven't fried up any bologna here in Belgium yet, but it is available. And it's in the shape of a bear :)