Sixteen the Hard Way -19.1- Cruet World

I cut up veggies for salad, we eat a lot of rabbit food as Dad sometimes calls it, but both Donna and I are teenagers and no zits between us. I love raw carrots, and you can make a wonderful salad just from turnips and spinach. We had more choice for this one though, carrots, red onions, cucumber, cabbage, yellow peppers and those little radishes to bite back.

Mom busied herself with a sauce for the pasta and made commentary on our purchases. “You came through like a trooper, Joni. I thought several times that you were gonna cut and run out on us, but you stuck it through.”

“It wasn’t easy,” I admitted. “Is shopping for clothes always so exhausting?”

“Hmm,” she murmured. “Needs basil.” Then she laughed. “Heidi’s the real champion shopper in the family. I’ve known her to spend four hours just buying a pair of shoes.”

I rolled my eyes and peeled another cucumber.

“You only have to take about half the peel off those; they’re English. Leave part of the peel, and they’ll have a stronger flavor.”

“Their behavior going in is not the real concern,” I mentioned.

We both laughed.

“Cutting them fairly thin helps with that, too,” Mom suggested.

“Mmm, hmm,” I agreed. I sliced little cucumber medallions about twice coin thickness and tossed them into the salad bowl. The little yellow peppers only needed their stems removed; we all liked the bit of bite they had if you left them with their seeds. Well, all of us, except Linda, who had once mistaken a jalapeño for a mild yellow pepper and was wary now of anything that looked like a “holy-pain-o.”

I found the cruet in the cabinet and began to mix up some salad dressing with red wine vinegar, a packet of spices, water and extra-virgin olive oil. “If the extra virgins are all making olive oil, what job were the first batch needed for?” I asked.

“That’s one of your father’s jokes,” Mom commented.

“Yeah, and no one would explain it to me until I was eleven!”

We laughed again, and I realized that Mom and I had always gotten along like this. Donna was the prickly one, who could always find something to snark about.