Gruel for Dinner Upon Request

Tonight's dinner was a little wild, in a kind of unwild way. I came in late after delivering a load of hay to Honeychild. A fellow in the neighborhood agreed to haul the hay in his truck for me, but he had to drive my bales through a muddy ditch and across a small stream, and he (unfortunately) idled in the muddy spot while waiting for me to open a gate. Luckily I am 90% muscle (right?) and 10% bone (think crowbar) and I pushed him out and got very spattered with black mud. I am relieved, though, that Muley has another dozen bales stored overhead.

So I came in late and mudspattered and had to clean up a little before starting dinner. My grandfather had eye surgury today, so we joked that I'd better feed him something really easy to eat, like gruel. I decided I'd make some split pea soup. But what to go with it? I wanted to make scones, but I used our last half pound of butter (yes) making cookies last night and again this morning (yes). So I sat down with my favorite cookbook, "Best Lost Recipes" from NPR, and began perusing. Quickly, because it was almost 5:00 and I usually try to have dinner on the table by six o'clcok.

One of the first recipes was for a deviled egg recipe called "Angry Eggs." I'm not sure why, but boiled eggs seemed to make sense to me alongside split pea soup, so I hopped up and got six eggs boiling. Then I got my peas boiling, too, and sat back down. A few pages further I found a recipe for kichel, a Jewish sweet cracker I'd never made before. This recipe called for lots of grated onion. My grandfather loves onions, and I like onions too. Done. I had vegetables, meat, and bread. Well... peas, eggs, and crackers. Close enough.

I immediately started on the kichel. I was in a blazing hurry. First I had to grate an onion, a tearful job. Once the eggs were done boiling I cooled them off and set them aside (the peas kept boiling away) and got back to my crackers, which involved, eventually, lots of flour and rolling with the rolling pin. And parchment paper and cookie sheets and brushing them with sugar water and salting them and finally sticking them in the oven, right about the time I noticed the peas were done, eek! I hadn't been able to remember the source of my usual pea soup recipe, so I'd used the closest at hand: a vegetarian version from Mark Bittman. Peas, water, salt, pepper. Done. Ok. Thanks for making it easy, Mark. I whisked it up and let it sit.

The deviled eggs were the quickest deviled eggs I think the south has ever seen. I mean, I cracked those buggers and peeled them and sliced them and dumped out their yolks about as fast as you can say "grandpa so-and-so's angry eggs," which was the name of the recipe. And then I clicked a set of measuring spoons into my left hand and the world swerved into a zone of rough approximations: this scoop of that, and that scoop of this, and a couple half scoops of this one. And some extra horseradish. And then mash mash mash! Shovel it back into the eggs because the oven is beeping and the crackers are done!

"Yellow, Papa Joe, three minutes until dinner!" I holler through the doorway.
"What? We hear you shouting, but what did you say?"
"Dinner, two minutes!"
"Okay, okay, we're coming..."

Splash glasses of iced water on the table, refold the napkins, forks on the left, spoons on the right, plates out, crackers on the platter, eggs to the table ("oh boy!" says Papa Joe with a delighted look on his face), soup in the ladle, ladle in the bowl, ("Speedy Gonzales!" they say, watching me), oven off, burners off, bowls to the placemats--

Grace.

Papa Joe makes grace go on longer than any of the other graces we've had. He's glad his surgury went well. Yellow and I say a loud amen and we all dig in.