Six Sentence Stories - Mate

With another holiday season approaching, and most of all the reason for the season, I've decided to use Zoe's blog hop to step right up with a story that I'm linking to Six Sentence Stories - Mate. Many stories are repeated year after year as families come together around the table to feast. Stories unite us to one another and that is a beautiful gift.

With the holidays approaching, she began making a list of certain items that she needed to buy to make their normal plain food taste extraordinaire, perhaps following in the footsteps of her own creative mother.

Green beans that were typically served alone with just a dab of butter and a little salt would be served at the Christmas meal after it had been baked with cream of mushroom soup. Many years later it was considered quite an odd pairing by some of the children who survived that taste only because it had some crunchy canned fried onions as a topping to disguise the taste of the mushrooms. The aroma of boiled and then baked carrots which had been drizzled with butter and ample brown sugar sprinkled on top until they were the color of cinnamon toast, just short of being burnt, was much more palatable to the youngsters.

At Christmas it was a tradition for the family to crack walnuts to be stirred into fudge and into the creamy divinity, which was the consistency of a soft-boiled candy, just the way her mate preferred it. Some of the walnuts were always saved to stuff inside some large dates which were then rolled in powdered sugar and served on a platter full of candies, but in her immediate family there was no Risalamande, a rich Danish rice pudding with an almond hidden in it waiting to be found, but who knows, perhaps a grandchild would someday have that experience.