The Great Cube Steak Wars

“Just cook the kind of food that you like to eat,” instructed my wife as she pranced around the kitchen like my Uncle Jimmy.  I glanced up from the kitchen table where I had been sitting for two hours trying to make a grocery list that would somehow translate out to four evening meals.  So far, my list included one package of all beef wieners, two cans of chili con carne without beans, yellow onions, one package of hot dog buns, and a six-pack of premium amber ale. Scratched off of my list were “Steak-Ums,” (those packages of individually wrapped frozen deli slices of something that looked like meat that you tossed into a frying pan with a cube of melted butter and stirred around with a fork until you had a browned pile of meat-like matter that you popped into a steak roll or a hot dog bun and smothered in Arby’s bbq sauce).  My wife said that the Food and Drug Administration had forced the removal of “Steak-Ums” from the market when she was still in high school, and that Arby’s bbq sauce disappeared at about the same time as Jimmy Hoffa, and under similar circumstances.  


She made it sound so easy….”cook the kind of food that I liked.”  The kind of food that I liked was the kind that was sitting before me on the table when I came home from fishing, and before that, the kind that my first wife had sitting before me on the table when I came home from work.  And before that, the kind that my Mom had sitting on the table before me when I came home from wherever I was before dinner.  And, of course, I really liked the kind of food that my grandmothers prepared and served every day of their lives.  I was never fond of the food prepared by Uncle Jimmy, but even that was sounding pretty good about now.  I returned to studying my list while my wife disappeared into the computer room.  I could swear I heard her giggling, but it might have been the cat hacking up a hairball.  


Suddenly, out of a set of loosely connected memories, thoughts and experiences, I had what can only be called an epiphany.  DAY ONE: cube steak, Betty Crocker scalloped potatoes and canned green beans;  DAY TWO:  cube steak sandwiches and a family-size can of Campbell’s Mmmm-Mmmm-Good Tomato Soup;  DAY THREE:  what Mom used to call breakfast-dinner, scrambled eggs, frozen waffles and a choice of either fried Spam or cube steak;  DAY FOUR:  Kraft Mac and Cheese with chunks of Spam.  I had four nutritionally-balanced meals, and they were well within my wife’s normal food budget.  Once again, the laws of Nature had prevailed.  If you want a job done right and completed under-budget, place a man in charge.  


Meanwhile, I would put in a call to my Mom and beg her to send me copies of her most treasured recipes.  I was feeling good.  “Simple food for simple folk.”  Yes sir, that’s how I remembered it.  My list completed, I left it beside my wife’s purse as I walked out to the garage to tie a few salmon leaders and oil my saltwater reels.