A couple of days ago, I called my 97-year-old Grandmother, a.k.a. Nana Maude. I talked to her for a few minutes about the new shoes I sent her, which she loved, thank God, and then I handed the phone to my husband, Charlie. Whereupon, she began whining about the food at her nursing home.
“It’s not even American,” she lamented.
For those who are new to my casa de crazy, Nana lived with us here in Ohio for 27 very long months. Then, one year ago today, she moved into Mt. Olive Care Center (the nursing home) in Georgia about 3 miles from where she lived for 49 years until her house got foreclosed on because of my drug addict brother, which you can read about beginning with this post - http://tenaciousbitch.com/2011/03/16/danny-the-stolen-cash-and-the-stripper/
I stayed with her for a week until she got settled in her new digs. During that time, she was served:
1) Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans. She hated the beans because they weren’t “seasoned right”. Meaning, they weren’t simmered for 19 hours in a vat laden with salt, onions and bacon – until they resembled a really fine green paste. Besides fried chicken, they also offered chicken Marsala. Therefore, they did sneak a bit of Italian cuisine in there alongside the not-so-American fried chicken…:)
2) Meatloaf with boiled potatoes and a salad. The alternate choice was sweet and sour chicken, so they did borrow from other cultures…BAD CHEFS…BAD! :)
3) And one day at lunch, they brought Nana a steak sandwich and French fries. She said the steak was tough, so she wouldn’t touch it, and they brought her a PB&J. I ate the steak sandwich, which was thinly sliced and relatively tender, I thought, but my choppers aren’t 90+ years old.
4) One morning, they brought her scrambled eggs, bacon and white toast with butter and strawberry jam. Funny, I made that exact same meal on many occasions while she lived with us. Hmmm…
5) The last day I was there, she was given a ham and cheese sandwich, a bowl of Jell-O and a banana for lunch with a cup of vanilla ice cream for dessert.
And I remember all of this because I helped her fill out her menu requests – relieved that they always served something I thought she’d eat…but she didn’t because it wasn’t American. Oh, wait…that’s her excuse now. At the time, her meals were too spicy, too sweet, too salty, too peppery, and the list goes on – though I found none of the entrees espousing these traits except the fried chicken was a little peppery. Other than that, I thought the food was pretty frickin’ good for a rest home as Nana calls it with disdain.
Just out of curiosity to see if the menu had changed drastically, I looked on the nursing home’s website today where they post menus for the residents’ families in case they’d like to drop by and share a meal with their loved one. For dinner today, they listed:
Beef stew and biscuits or fried pork chops with mashed potatoes and peas, and tomorrow night they advertised chili (oh, god, you’re right, Nana, that’s TEX-MEX) and barbecued wings or honey glazed ham with fried potatoes or baked potatoes and cole slaw. Additionally, you can get cole slaw with your wings and/or chili as well.
That said, I’m not sure why she insists they’re feeding them non-American cuisine. Perhaps, she’s just run out of negative adjectives and decided to utilize more heinous-sounding language instead of the truth:
She doesn’t want anything except entrees from one of her favorite restaurants – or food that she, herself, has prepared, which she, obviously can’t do anymore…though she loves my potato soup, and she loved my husband’s liver and onions.
She also loved what she called – “my spaghetti”, but the slop she referred to was merely hamburger slathered in Prego, which is about 30% high fructose corn syrup, and I think it’s nasty. But I let her think it was “my sauce”, so she’d eat it.
In reality, I make my meaty Italian sauce almost from scratch, but the few times she consumed that which my boys and my husband gobble up in the blink of an eye was too tomato-y according to Nana. But it looks just a RED and tomato-infested as mine, so go figure. So, I allegedly tried a “new recipe”, the heretofore mentioned – Prego and ground beef for her and my homemade spaghetti for everyone else – i.e. making a separate meal for her, which we we had to do about half the time.
But, holy hell, Nana, spaghetti is ITALIAN, why in heaven’s name were you eating that? :)
ANYWHO…toward the end of her rant, I saw Charlie cup his hand over his mouth, and I knew she’d just delivered a zinger of verbal insanity, and I was right.
“But you know me, Charlie, I’m not picky…”
To-wit, Charlie and I let go of some serious belly laughs. And this from the woman who grumbled about her breakfast the morning of our departure for Georgia as such:
“Why are my eggs so big?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, rather puzzled after I set her scrambled eggs, sausage gravy and a biscuit down in front of her.
“Do you put milk in them?”
“Yes, Nana,” I said, rolling my eyes because she’d posed that query at least 492 times.
She frowned and said, “When I made them, they were much smaller.”
Oh, for the love of chicken embryos…forgive me, Nana, I wanted to say. I let the eggs cook a little too long before I “scrambled” them up and plopped them on your plate, but even at her age…she can still cut up her own damned eggs, which she began doing the moment I headed for the door.
For other depictions of why Nana “isn’t” picky – check out:
http://tenaciousbitch.com/2012/07/31/post-70-more-baloney-from-ms-cranky-pants/
or
http://tenaciousbitch.com/2012/06/28/post-66-baloney-porn-or-is-it-bologna-porn/
It’s difficult to imagine ever being that unaware of one’s own personality, but it’s not her age, Nana has always been that way…even when I was a kid, but that’s another yarn to unravel another day…:)
Over and out from Crazytown…
~TenaciousBitch and her band of truth-spouting hippies
TB/ks
© Tenacious Bitch 2014
