Nilda was peeking over my shoulder last night when I was a writing away, and she asked why I was so busy writing about myself when this was supposed to be a blog about what we did everyday so all our relatives could sort of follow along on our travels. I suspect I should start doing what she asked me to do, telling you about a day involving Nilda herself, and one of the few banes of my existence, which is Nilda’s weekly visit to the beauty parlor.
That woman has always been a real looker, sort a like a snowflake that has landed on a manure pile. And as long as I’ve know her she has to get herself all rebeautified each week at the beauty parlor. Something that’s easy when you live up on the Gulch, but not so easy when you are traveling all around the country. Course the fact that sorry excuse for a 5th wheel that we live in is breakin’ down all the time, makes for longer stays where ever we might be, and so Nilda can kind of fit in with the local ladies.
Seems like every time she comes back, she’s got some new notion in her head about somewhere we should go, or something we should see or do. This time it was something different. Seems like the ladies had been talking food, each of them goin’ on about what their favorite recipe was, and one of the ladies, who was also staying at the same RV park we was temporarily marooned at, said her husbands favorite was chocolate moose, something he had in a fancy restaurant one time, but that she had never cooked.
None of them ladies had any idea as to how to fix it, but as this lady described it, it was mighty flavorful and creamy. Now Nilda’s Ma was one of those females who thought her girls needed exposure to the finer things to be prepared for life, and as such, they sometimes had the most gawdauful concoctions laid before them at the table. I learned right quick, when I was a hot and heavy after Nilda, that Sunday dinner, or any meal for that matter, needed to be over at our place, or just any place other than where ever Nilda’s Ma was cookin’.
Problem was that adventuresome streak rubbed off on Nilda, and there’s been times when even the dogs turned their noses up at the leftovers. Some weeks back we got a package in the mail from Nilda’s next older sister, Neldia. (Thank goodness her Ma and Pa didn’t save that one for Nilda) And in the box, among other things once we got through all the barely used Sears catalog pages they used for packaging, was some dried deer lips, which their mother had always considered some sort of delicacy.
I figured that Neldia had sent them to Nilda cause even if Nilda threw them out, maybe there were some dogs in our RV Park that had never tasted anything like them. Nilda, bless her sweet little heart has always been frugal, and so instead of throwing them out, she just tucked them in the back corner of a cabinet. To show the way her mind works, when she heard about that chocolate moose, she immediately remembered those dried deer lips, cause to her a moose and a deer was about as close cousins as one could have. Kinda like Nilda and Aunt May Jo Beth’s girl, Hilda. As they always joked, except for one slightly bent line they could be identical twins. (Nilda finally had to explain that one to me, saying, “It’s the difference between an H and an N, you big dummy.”)
Given all this, those lips were cooked for four days to soften ‘em up a might and get the gelatin, as she called it, all boiled out. Then came three packages of chocolate pudding mix, a box of leftover chocolates from Valentine’s Day, Nilda always being watchful of here waistline, a couple of egg whites, and also part of a sack of sugar. She was a hummin’ and a smilin’ as she stood there for what seemed like hours, a cookin’ that mixture to what was supposed to the perfect consistency.
That night she was near bustin’ her bust buttons as she set a big bowl of that chocolate moose down in front of each of us. I thought I remembered her saying when she came back from the beauty parlor, that that fellar had ate his chocolate moose for dessert. Now here she was a servin’ it as the main course, but Nilda had trained me over the years to believe that she knew best, so I didn’t say a thing. Now you know the most amazing thing about that chocolate moose? There wasn’t a single dog in that RV park that would eat it when we threw it out.
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