The Q-View

Yesterday, my mother took a nap.

I took it as a compliment.

She is 90-years-old and seven years post-stroke but living “independently”, if you disregard the routine tasks her children do for her: spot cleaning, laundry, landscaping, prescription filling, chauffeuring, bed changing, shopping, remote finding, etc. And that now includes some of the labor-intensive cooking, like meatballs.

My mother gets uneasy unless she has at least 30 meatballs in the freezer. Just in case. It has become too much for her to mix the ingredients, roll the meat, lift the broiler pan. For awhile, my son picked up the slack and made the meatballs, but work is crazy and he has a house and a child.

In desperation, my mother turned to me.

My kids always say that if it hadn’t been for ham steaks they would have starved to death during my wife’s crazy-travel-for-work years. Untrue. I also served hot dogs and baked beans, hamburger helper, tacos, chicken strips. If it was pre-made and/or microwaveable, I could do it.

Starting from scratch was a whole new ballgame.

My mother had already schooled me on her pasta sauce about a year ago. And she has walked me through homemade pizza.

Meatballs are her holy grail though.

The first time she supervised me was not fun: I didn’t measure the spices correctly, the mixture was too dry, put more parsley in, oil the pan better. The best was “The meatball is too small.” Re-roll. “The meatball is too big.”

Sigh.

Somehow things worked out that first time, and I made 75 edible meatballs.

This time, she did some of the first mixture of ground sirloin, spices, bread, eggs, water while I went to the store for her.

When I got back, she told me to take over and walkered off to take a nap leaving me ALONE in the kitchen. She didn’t even stay for meatball circumference inspection!

This time I only made 37 meatballs because she had only thawed one family pack. Why? I “sounded mad” over the phone the night before when she said I had to go to The Head Nut for more spices.

Sigh.

At dinner, she offered, “The meatballs are much moister than the last ones.”

I think that might have been another compliment!