Sweet and Sour Pot Roast
Alternate title: “The Reeds are goofy.”
Apparently competition got stiff in couples’ Foosball and Dad enthusiastically spun, whacked his hand on the ceiling light, and had to get stitches.
This caption is pure Mom. ha ha
Us at one of our birthday parties at Mallette St. Judging by our tans it might be mine (August).
I have a bowl haircut and Elisabeth loves her toy.
Everyone modeled the fur coat that summer at Conesus Lake! Here is Dad.
Even my glamorous Nonnie is a goofball.
Uncle Bill at the Watauga St. house in Kingsport.
Dad makes sure that Grandma Peeler gets some wine. (That bust is now in my upstairs hall. It used to terrify my kid.)
We love a reenactment! And, I’m so glad I finally stopped wearing eyeliner UNDER my eyes.
For Dad’s 75th birthday we recreated the portrait that he had commissioned of us (for one of Mom’s birthdays) with our kids. A horse walks into a bar, the bartender says, “Why the long face?”. WHY THE LONG FACES?, indeed!
I love Dad’s glee in this photo. Here they are dancing while everyone ignores them. I’m assuming there was music but who knows?!
Dad dancing with my daughter on the QM2. We snuck her into the disco. There’s a good chance they were dancing to Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”. The band would play it when Dad walked into the room because he had requested it so many times.
Dad dancing with a weird Yeti at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe.
3 generations of Reeds at the world’s largest Pistachio in New Mexico.
I don’t remember this moment but apparently I once licked an ice sculpture with my roommate, Missy. (She sent me the picture and I was dumbfounded!) This photo is a stand in for the time Dad made Elisabeth lick the treble clef ice sculpture at her graduation from Eastman Conservatory. (She did.)
Guess which one is ours?! My goofy rainbow daughter at camp.
When I was little, my individualism was extremely important to me. (Cue the two-headed calf poem from last week.) I was kind of fascinated with the idea of running away from home, not because life was so bad, but more as a test of my independence. I loved the book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler where the kids ran away and lived in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So, every now and then when I got fed up I would announce that I was running away. I would pack a couple of things and take off for a few hours. I guess Mom and Dad knew that I would return home. I was soft. The one comment I remember from my mother was, “Don’t walk by the bus station”. Fair enough. The bus station was a block West of our house and some shady dudes hung out there drinking in the parking lot. My individualism kind of became a family joke. On my 13th birthday Mom and Dad sat me down and said, “There’s something we need to tell you. You’re not adopted.” How’s that for some funny stuff? When I was moving from New York in the 90s and looking for a place to land, my sister suggested I move to Seattle to be near her. I responded that “I needed my own region”. That kind of offended her, I fear, but it turned out to be a good impulse because I ended up in Texas where I’ve created a wonderful life.
But, as much as I like to identify as ME, some things are undeniable: I’ve got the Reed genes. We are goofballs with a dark sense of humor. We adore a high culture / low culture mashup. And we LOVE TO DANCE. Seriously. All of us. At my niece’s Bat Mitzvah a few years ago, it was pretty obvious who was a Reed (or Volberg). The only people consistently on the dance floor were 13 year old kids and us. At my wedding reception in 2000 (at a Texas roadhouse) we had a Zydeco band. Photos from that night show various members of our family dripping with sweat and shaking it hard! Years later I was talking to one of my husband’s law school friends who I don’t know that well. He and his wife had been at our wedding. They complimented us on it “actually being fun” (thanks!) and said, “There was this one guy who was getting after it! He was wearing shades, shaking his booty, and he danced with all of the ladies.” Um, that was my dad. I remember him doing something similar at my cousin’s wedding in Vermont. He made up a dance called “the hunchback” and it killed. That wedding was a classier affair than mine, but we brought it down to our level!
In terms of dark humor, I remember a particular family funeral in Kingsport, Tennessee. First of all, the driving directions we were given involved cutting through the Wendy’s parking lot to get to the cemetery. If you are a Reed, why take the classy way?! Then, while killing time in the car waiting for the procession to start, my aunt Lisa and I talked about how you can rate your friends based on what they would bring to the house when you died. A ham? Now, that’s a good friend! Store bought cookies? Keep walking. Aunt Lisa also had me to a dinner party at her place in New York when I lived there. One guest questioned why there wasn’t a fabulous restaurant where people could store their loved ones’ ashes? You could visit AND have a great meal! (That idea is free for the taking if you want to act on it.) I guess, to quote the opening sentence of my Aunt Lisa’s book, Kinflicks, “My family has always been into death”.
Mom was really funny, too. Her wit was dry and and her timing was perfect. When I was growing up, there was a program for senior citizens called “Edlerhostel”. Every time we went to the symphony or some event, a bus would swoop in and all of these old people would unload and cut in front of us. Mom took to calling them “the hostile elders”. Watching ice skating on TV with Mom was always entertaining because she was quick to point out tacky things, of which there are many. Mom did not suffer tacky. Mom was so elegant that it was often surprising when she said something silly, like the time when her salad arrived covered in that Japanese ginger dressing with pureed carrots. She said, “It looks like a bunny threw up on my plate”. That was totally unexpected and had me tickled for minutes.
So, for today’s recipe, I’m going to give you the pot roast that I mentioned last week. The recipe had a cute annotation from Mom. “This is the sweet and sour one I love – we ate it a lot when you were little.” And, Mom has some choice words about the “bossy recipe” which I left in. Enjoy!
SWEET & SOUR POT ROAST
4 lbs blade pot roast, 1 ½” thick
3 Tbsp flour
1 tsp salt
½ tsp dry mustard
1 ½ Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp brown sugar
Dash pepper
¾ cup ketchup
1 Tbsp vinegar
5 or 6 cloves
1 or 2 stalks celery, sliced
6 small whole carrots
2 medium onions, quartered
1 medium green pepper, cut in rings
3 firm medium tomatoes, cut in wedges
Brown roast slowly 20-30 minutes on grill with hickory added.
(Optional – I usually just brown it in a pan quickly and throw everything in and cook it til it’s done – and I tend to cut things up any old way, ignoring this bossy recipe.)
Season with salt and pepper.
Combine next 8 ingredients for sauce.
Can cook it in heavy foil over coals, but why bother?
It’ll take a long time – check it after an hour.
Good luck.
[Sarah’s note: There’s no temperature listed so I’m going to guess 350 degrees.]
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