Meat and My Mom

A & I had dinner with my mom & older brother last night. My older brother just bought a very slick gas grill and so he wanted to try it out. In our historic family tradition, this was an opportunity for waaaaaay too much food: big steaks, baked potatos, garlic bread, huge salad, grilled asparagus (this was my contribution in an effort to try to cut the meat a bit) and strawberry rhubarb pie. Tomorrow night we will have ribs. And corn and potato salad, in case we were feeling skinny or something.

My mother is just not up on the vegetarianism/eat less meat/a salad can be a meal thing. Back in the day when I was a vegetarian, or mostly one, a trip home was a real ordeal. I remember my younger brother and A and I in hysterics one Christmas visit over the MEAT THREE TIMES A DAY menu. My mom, at that point, considered chicken a vegetable - also bacon. Haven't you ever seen a bacon tree? A nice potted chicken? She just can't wrap her mind around a daily menu that doesn't go like this:
Breakfast: eggs & bacon or ham slices or sausage or corned beef hash.
Lunch: Ham or turkey or roast beef sandwich. Maybe with more bacon. Perhaps some beef broth based soup to go along with it.
Dinner: Huge slabs of MEEEEAAAAAAATTTTTTTTT.
It's purely miraculous that we didn't all die of heart attacks at the age of 16 or so. And if we were being vegetarians at the time, or had brought vegetarians home for a visit, this was cause for terrible concern. So the menu would be altered thus:
Breakfast: oatmeal and bacon, or eggs and bacon, or fruit and bacon. You. Will. Eat. Bacon!
Lunch: Chicken sandwiches. Or chicken soup. Or just possible, grilled cheese sandwiches with chicken soup or tomato soup made with, you guessed it, chicken broth!
Dinner: Chicken. Or possibly fish. Because you can not have dinner without some form of animal protein. It. Just. Is. Not. Possible.

It's a generational thing. She's a sophisticated, smart woman and a cordon bleu quality chef, but the idea that you might have fruit for breakfast, yogurt for lunch and a salad for dinner is completely beyond her. Part of this is that, damn her, she has never in her life gained an extra ounce no matter what she eats and even, in the seventies, went to a spa to gain weight. That I didn't inherit her metabolism is hideously unfair, IMHO, as is the genetic sweepstakes that gave my brothers blonde hair and blue eyes and me brown eyes and brownish reddish hair. And myopia. Did I mention the myopia?

Ah well. I don't need to fit into my jeans ever again, do I?