Here is a holiday story that you might find funny. My sister-in-law went with her father to one of his Eagles Club Dinners and they had a really good soup so she got the recipe. We were planning our Christmas "get-together" so she said she would bring this soup she got the recipe for. My sister-in-law works full time plus keeps up with my niece who is two months older than my son so she kind of harried sometimes. She started buying the ingredients for this soup which along the way should have set off warning bells but she didn't notice.
For example, the recipe called for FOUR packages of fresh mushrooms. My sister-in-law lives about 3 miles outside a very small town so she likes to shop at the little store there as much as possible so it stays open rather than driving the 15 miles into the decent sized town my brother works in. The little store only had three packages of mushroom which was more than likely their whole weeks inventory. So she called my brother at work and asked him to pick up another package of mushrooms in town before he came home. After she got home, she noticed the recipe called for ONE CUP of pepper...another warning sign missed. She didn't have a full cup of pepper in her pepper box so called my brother again and added a big box of pepper to her list. After, my brother arrived home with the rest of her ingredients, she started to slice all the vegetables and put the soup together. Alas she read down far enough to discover that she needed two large stockpots rather than just the one she had been tossing things into. She was in trouble because she only had one stockpot so she called my mother because her mother doesn't cook much, less you count warming frozen food.
She explained to my Mother that she needed to borrow a stock pot. Mom said, "I thought you had one of those?" She did but claimed the recipe she was using called for two. Mom said this couldn't be right because you normally only need one to make soup. So she asked that my sister-in-law read her the recipe, she got to the four packages of mushrooms and Mom said, "Is it a Mushroom soup"? No, it was actually a vegetable soup. When she got to the cup of pepper, Mom laughed. "You have enough soup to feed an army", Mom said. So she was going to end up with two big stockpots of soup. Mom suggested freezing some which was a good idea, so all the freezer containers she had were filled. At the party, she kept pushing the soup..."Have some more soup!" It was really good soup but not that you would want two pots of it. Mom offered to cut the recipe down for my sister-in-law because she had no idea you could do that. *grin* Poor girl didn't have much of a cooking role model so you really can't blame her. We all went home with containers of soup as Mom brought over more containers with her. We had all had a good laugh over the Christmas Soup.
We are lucky to have her still with us because of past Christmas'. One year, Mom had made chicken livers special for my brother because he loves them and his wife won't cook them for him because they are gross. (I don't eat them either.) So my brother eat them and fed some to his daughter who liked them too, while my sister-in-law cried because he was feeding gross things to her baby. Cruel.
Another time, my father fed her pickled herring in cream sauce on a Ritz cracker. He told her was a "Slaa-ja" which I believe is the Polish name for those, as she was smart enough to ask. She rushed to the bathroom after that taste.
She's the most wonderful sister-in-law that I could have and we love her but we sure are hard on her.
