Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Terrorist Review of God's Gym Review of Cherry Blossoms in Twilight Creative Nonfiction Ain't Is A Word By Marcie Hollowell & Kristen Munch Love Under the Big Top By Andy Martello Revival By Brenda G. Wooley Poetry Letting Go Wish By Antoinette Brim Pam Farwick By G. David Schwartz Confession While Dining By Mary Lou Taylor Homeschooling Adventures By Beth Happel Fiction Ike Experiences Vanity By Sidney Kidd What Keeps Me Alive By Paul Brittain Minor Damage By Jane Hammons How To Cook for Your In-Laws By Ricky Ginsburg About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch. |
How To Cook for Your In-Laws Or There's No Cayenne Pepper in Apple Sauce By Ricky Ginsburg There’s a reason ‘fear’ and ‘food’ both begin with the same letter. It will become clear to you the first time your husband invites his family for dinner. You can pick your husband, that’s the easy part, but you can’t pick his family (or your own for that matter). Kind of like buying a boat; you choose the color and he selects the friends who will make it impossible for you to ever get a front seat. Life gives you these add-ons for free. You get married and you become the proud owner of a collection of hungry Bulgarians who expect you to produce stuffed cabbage and fresh oven-baked kravai as if you’ve been cooking it for years. You can’t stand the stench of cooked cabbage, it’s worse than a rotting bucket of carp on a hot summer day. If you’re really lucky, you’ll marry a man with family at least three time zones west of you or, better yet, a family of habitual dieters. Serve them Melba toast and bottled water while you feast on broiled lobster immersed in tubs of molten butter and see if they swoon. The dieters will bring their own food after the first meal. They have no compunction about strolling healthily through your home with brown shopping bags full of fresh endive, rapini and kohlrabi. You can deep fry the arugala but you’ll never get them to eat it, with or without chocolate mustard sauce. The most dismal in-laws to inherit come from the British Isles. If you’ve ever eaten a meal in an English pub you’ll agree with me. French-roasted cardboard with English mustard and dry rye toast, a meal to curl your taste buds, has it beat. It must be the gloomy weather inspiring all the dreary food and stagnant beer. Your very prim yet bowling pin-shaped mother-in-law will frown as you bumfuzzle your only attempt at bangers and mash, while you swear to never cook anything in lard again. Remind her that her son has lost the thirty-five extra pounds her cooking had him carry all those years. Don’t worry about his dad; he’s brought enough warm English swill to keep himself anesthetized for the evening and most of the next month. Your husband who trails in dust and the occasional dead bug from the outside will have no match when it comes to your Portuguese mother-in-law’s six year old triplets. You’ll spend the entire day cleaning those places under the toilet in your bathroom you’ve only just seen for the first time in four and a half years. The triplets will undoubtedly find a way to get mud caked into those same places. Your cat will do its best to avoid a trip in the clothes dryer and burn up one of its nine lives. And you will do your best to follow Senora’s instructions written in Portuguese, with an amazing lack of help from the two semesters of high school Spanish you barely passed. His father, a retired Bolivian alpaca farmer who has pretended to understand her for fifty-seven years, will just shrug his shoulders and smile. Regardless of where these folks come from, you’ve got to get the house prepared before you even think about cooking. Even if they live in a thatched-hut, you’re expected to reside in a mansion; after all, you married their son. Don’t hide the pot plant in the house; especially in your shower. Put it in the neighbor’s backyard for the night. Likewise for the chrome-plated sex toys. Be assured someone is bound to rifle the drawers in your bathroom. If the children arrive unsedated you should have a plan which will restrict their access to anything not made out of hardened steel or reinforced concrete. Many cultures actually approve of chains and leg irons for small unruly children; ask your husband for advice. You should have a liquor supply of sufficient quantity of whatever it takes to reduce the in-laws to a stupor. Pour them a drink and bolt them to your sofa; you’ll need the extra time to deal with their dinner donation - a basketball-sized chunk of reddish-gray colored meat covered with enough fat to deep fry a turkey. Vodka for the Russians, gin for the Brits, rum for the Jamaicans, valium for you. Know how to set the right table for your brother-in-law from Hong Kong who never learned to use chopsticks. (How do they eat the soup?) Remember children don’t need sharp knives to cause irreparable damage to your one-of-a-kind, hand-carved Canadian maple table. Even the most formal rules of etiquette mention finger food for toddlers under the age of twenty-five. You might as well use the fine china, even with the kids; you know it’ll be several years before you need it again. Declare the seat closest to the kitchen yours and the one nearest the front door for your husband. Don’t be afraid to use the same Wal-Mart “Happy Birthday” tablecloth again; put the ripped edge by your husband’s seat. Offer carry-out trays for the triplets. With your guests comfortably planted in well protected furniture and a hot platter of prepackaged hors d'oeuvres within easy reach, you can escape to the kitchen. It will be your husband’s task to occupy them for the three and half hours of roasting it will take for the side of strange animal they brought to hit medium-well. You should always buy a house with a kitchen door equipped with secure locks or slide the refrigerator over to keep it closed. You’re not running a TV cooking show and the only company you want in the kitchen at a time like this is your best friend from next door, the one who got you the valium. The magic you can invoke in a sealed kitchen would make Houdini grin and Julia Childs grimace. Everything tastes exotic when you add enough roasted garlic, sautéed onions, and any two spices from the revolving teak rack your mother-in-law gave you as a house warming gift. Remember to take off the inner seal before you try to shake the four year old spices out of the bottles. Mix and blend, stir and whisk, make a lot of noise in the kitchen and you will at least draw sympathy credits. Run the mixer, the blender and open several cans of baked beans even if you don’t intend to use them. Be cautious with the spices, especially the ones with pictures of scrunchy looking peppers on their labels. You will want to send your in-laws home with vivid memories, ones which will at least make them think twice about coming back. Consider the cost of gas, parking and your husband’s patience if you send them to a hospital first. An internet-ready computer in the kitchen is a far more reliable source of information than your mother’s cookbooks. The strange purple vegetable with the lime green hairs is probably going to taste better steamed than deep fried in Crisco, just “Ask Jeeves”. Betty Crocker never prepared a wild boar’s spleen, stuffed or plain, so you’ll have to have to search for recipes. Just hope there’s enough hard liquor to blur your sister-in-law’s sense of smell when you serve it. Distribute the final jeopardy on your most ornate and heavy platter, preferably one a guest bought you. Garnish it with all the detritus you cut off the mysterious red striped vegetables. Bright colors will distract the diners from the strange gray color of the main course. If the platter is heavy enough it will make it only once around the table so you can monitor who has seconds. If his mother calls for a refill you are doomed; perhaps you should have used the cayenne. But if your father-in-law goes for thirds you can rejoice in the knowledge mom’s not going to bring him back here again. No mother-in-law wishes to compete at that level. Pass the recipe on to your neighbor in repayment for the little blue pills; she might need it some day. Usher them out the door with all the leftovers. Make some pretense about leaving the country for several weeks. Count the children as they depart; give them each a kiss on their gooey cheeks, they hate kisses. Don’t feed the table scraps to your dog if you have any sense of animal welfare. And when it’s all over and the satiated family has gone off to permanently change their wills, you can always call for Chinese delivery and go out for Dairy Queen…but only once your stomach has settled. |