Cooking in the West

I heard on the radio the other day that children get their intelligence from their mothers. That might explain what has happened to my brain. Perhaps I drained part of it for the first child and the rest for the second. I can almost buy that theory--except for the fact that I have another theory that makes more sense to me: the Full Brain Theory. I believe my brain is like a computer that has no memory left. My brain is full, and my folders cannot be compacted. In fact, my brain is so full that according to the bathroom scale, my body is filling up with the overflow!

I have so much stuff crammed in my brain that I have become dependent upon sticky notes. Yes, I am up to a pack of Post-Its per day. If a strong wind blows any of my notes away, something is going to be forgotten or someone will get left at the dentist’s office or my name isn’t--just a minute I think that Post-It with my vital information is yellow or maybe it is purple. Anyway, you’ve got the picture!

As a forty-two year educator, I have begun to wonder if we are forcing kids to store volumes of useless information in their brains, so that later on in life when they need to recall an important thing like their mother-in-law’s birthday or their boss’s wife’s name, they cannot recall it because there was no room to store it.

For example, once when I was substituting in fifth grade, we spent two days of agony figuring out the areas of irregular shapes. The whole time, I wanted to say, “OK, enough of this--I have never in my life had to figure out the area of a rectangle with an octagon cut out of it. Come to think of it, I’ve never ever had to figure out the area nor the circumference of a circle, which is lucky since those pi formulas are so confusing. What lunatic thought of pi without an e on it that equals roughly 3.14159265358979323846. . .that’s not a number; it’s an infinite decimal, which NEVER repeats--it’s sheer lunacy! (Of course I didn’t memorize that number--I Googled it and wrote it on a Post-It note.) Run, children, save yourselves and save your brain space for important mathematical calculations like figuring out how to balance your budget when the price of groceries quadruples!”

A few days later I was hired to help seventh graders review for a chapter test in science. Did you realize that protists are eukaryotes because they all have a nucleus? Did you know that there are 1600 species of Euglena and most are unicellular? How would you like to retrieve this from your brain for the test--ciliates, sporozoans, and dinoflagellates are three phyla that are grouped into a clade known as the alveolates? I am pretty sure my brain suffered a triple aneurysm that day trying to wrap itself around seventh grade knowledge. I would have never passed their test, because my brain is just too full of that kind of “important” information that has no relevance to me and has clogged my synapses so they don’t even fire any more. No Child Left Behind has morphed into No Brain Cells Left Behind!

My brain is so busy trying to sort through the useless six quarters of Calculus I stored in there in college that I forgot to buy dog food on my last four trips to town. I cannot pass a dementia test even though I know the questions, because they don’t let you use sticky notes. I have several elderly relatives, so I know how those tests work. They give you three words to remember--simple unrelated words. Then they ask you several fine print pages of questions, chit chat for a half hour or so, and then at the end they ask you to tell them the three words. Impossible! I don’t think the test giver could do it if he/she didn’t have the words written on her clipboard. If you don’t know the three words, you might have dementia. If you try to give them a synopsis of the overloaded brain theory, they just look at you like THEY have dementia, and then they smile and pat your hand and write something on their clipboard that looks like “Accompanied by wacky relative--possibly with dementia. Verify medical power of attorney.”

I think there was a point to this column, but I lost my sticky note that told me what it was. Oh well, your brains are overloaded, so you probably wouldn’t have absorbed it anyway!

If your brain is overloaded, you might need some brain food in the form of beef! These are a few of my favorite beef crock pot recipes.

Crock Pot Lasagna

1 lb. burger, browned

1 med. onion, chopped

1 t. minced garlic

1 jar Ragu spaghetti sauce

16 oz. shredded Mozzarella cheese

12 oz. cottage cheese

1/2 C. grated Parmesan

12 oz. pkg. lasagna noodles

Brown burger with onion. Add in minced garlic and season with salt and pepper. Add spaghetti sauce. In another bowl, combine Mozzarella cheese, cottage cheese, and Parmesan. Spoon a layer of meat sauce into the slow cooker. Top with two layers of uncooked lasagna noodles broken to fit into the cooker. Top with cheese layer. Repeat the three layers twice more. Cook on low for 4 to 6 hours.

Slow Cooker Mushroom Roast

1 lbs. sliced fresh mushrooms

4 lbs. beef roast (chuck or cheap cuts work well)

1 envelope onion soup mix

12 oz. can of beer

Place mushrooms in bottom of the slow cooker. Top with roast. Sprinkle onion soup mix over top. Pour a can of beer on top. You may wish to season with a bit of pepper. Cook on low for 9 or 10 hours until beef is fork tender. Serve with mashed potatoes or noodles.

Mississippi Crock Pot Roast

3 to 4 lb. chuck roast

1/2 of twelve oz. jar pepperoncinis with juice

1/2 C. butter

1 packet Au Jus gravy mix

1 packet buttermilk Ranch dressing mix

salt and pepper to taste

Put roast in the crockpot and put all ingredients on top of it. Cook on low for about 8 hours until it is fork tender. Serve with potatoes or noodles or shred with a fork and serve in hoagie buns.