Hey there, can anybody please list some of the homemade country-side food (not junk-food, please!) Martha would prepare for Clark, please?

Not pasta, or any of those Italian things, or fast-food or take-out things. I want somethings which Clark might love to eat, prepared by Martha!

Let's see:
roast beef
BBQ beef (AKA loose meat served with ketchup and sweet relish on a bun)
fried chicken
roast chicken
green beans with onion and bacon
mashed potatoes

If you're looking for something specifically mid-west, look to Americanized versions of German cooking. Not too much sauce, but very hearty. Farmers generally eat big at breakfast and lunch and eat light at supper. (It's breakfast, dinner, supper.)

Also, older mid-westerners salt EVERYTHING - green onions, celery, melons, any vegetable on the table unless it's green salad - and sometimes that'll get salt too.

I'm serious here - a mid-westerner will pour a little pile of salt on their plate and dip their green onions and celery in it - for each bite! Of course, Kansas gets damnably hot in summer so it does make sense when you work without AC.

(I can just see Lois's reaction to Clark doing that at lunch sometime.)

For good ole Midwestern cooking, check out Lambert\'s Cafe .

They have good, down home cooking - see the menu here. This is probably the type of stuff Martha would make - we're in SW MO - probably pretty similar to what would be served in KS.

As for the salt... I accidentally ordered the wrong ham one time - ordered the really salty one instead of the regular one *gag*.
Carol

Hey that was fast!

Thanks a lot, guys! Any more additions is quite welcome.

You guys are making me seriously hungry here. Especially that menu. I want to visit Lambert's Cafe! BTW, what are 'throwed rolls'? [ETA: Never mind - found them. <G>]

LabRat (glad that dinner isn't far off and it's Stuart's speciality bolognaise night!)

Lambert's is a blast! They do throw your rolls at you. My best friend didn't believe me when I told her that...

Big mistake!

You can read my review of it here . If you're [the ubiquitous you - not just you Labby!] ever near one, make sure to go!

Carol

Har, okay, I had no idea Lambert's had other locations besides Gulf Shores, where I grew up. Shows how much I payed attention to the restaurant itself. The food was way more important of a priority.

JD

Y'all ain't mentioned meatloaf yet. Big Sunday dinner (mid-day meal) item, along with fried chicken and hush puppies. Great stuff, unless your gall bladder isn't working like it should.

My grandmother (in OKC) made - in addition to many of the foods already listed - the best chicken and dumplings ever. She also made incredible homemade biscuits, and she put gravy on everything. Breakfast, lunch, dinner - didn't matter. She had a gravy for it.

Lots of vegetables - especially things she could grow and can. Green beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes (*shudders*) carrots, cucumbers, and probably a bunch of others I'm forgetting.

The Kents are of a later generation than my grandparents, but I suspect some of these foods are still standard fare in the Midwest. They certainly are here in the South, where I live .

Caroline

I'm glad somebody mentioned meat loaf and of course fried chicken. Other things Martha might cook would include pot roast or fried pork chops or chicken pot pie. Maybe some kind of fried fish (probably bass or catfish, not trout). When I traveled Kansas for work years ago most of the restaurants advertised a "hot beef sandwich"; this was an open-faced sliced beef sandwich on white bread but it also had mashed potatoes (I don't remember whether they went on the bottom or the top) and the whole thing was covered with gravy. Restaurants never served anything but the cheapest white bread but if Martha wanted to make it special she would probably bake her own. Salads were not fancy; a country salad bar was a bowl of iceberg lettuce with a choice of four kinds of dressing. However, Martha would be able to grow her own lettuce and she could add cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers from her own garden. Other side dishes could include potato salad, cole slaw, or macaroni salad. Corn on the cob is always a popular vegetable (but messy to eat). Other vegetables might be peas, carrots, or green beans. Some restaurants serve fried apples. Other side dishes might include green bean casserole or green rice (rice baked with eggs and spinach). A normal meal would include one meat, one starch such as potatoes, two vegetables, and bread or rolls. Dessert would be chocolate cake, pie, or berry cobbler and might also be served with ice cream.

I just realized I should check my "Farm Journal's Country Cookbook." It's an older cookbook, published in 1981. Recipes there include pot roast, beef stew, barbecued short ribs, corned beef with cabbage, hamburgers, meat loaf, lamb roast, whole pit-roasted pig, pork chops, cabbage rolls, fried chicken, roast turkey, salmon loaf and tuna pie (using canned salmon or tuna); they go on and on.

Martha, however, is pretty sophisticated and might be into classic French or Italian cooking; most of the ingredients should also be available in Kansas.

Ya'll are making me hungry!! Lamberts is great food. I love how they walk around with bowls of sides and offer them to you! Most restaurants you get to pick your two sides and that's it unless you want to pay more. And they have fried okra. I LOVE fried okra.

And one thing my grandparents did every couple weeks (they lived in central Illinois) Breakfast stuff at supper - eggs, toast, cottage cheese, pastry, fruit.

And casseroles. Older mid-westerners (older that Martha and Jonathan, but they might fit this as well) didn't eat store bought fish except frozen or in cans. So, fish sticks. And an oddity of note, chances are the schools in Smallville served fish sticks and French fries for lunch every Friday while Clark was little.

Fish sticks and french fries weren't odd, they just were the custom for school lunch on Fridays (alternated with macaroni and cheese) back in the days when Catholics did not eat meat on Fridays. The custom stayed in a lot of places even after the church changed the restriction.

And when I mentioned maybe eating fish, I was thinking about locally caught or farmed fish, which is why I said no trout. Something that could be raised in a farm pond. There are no mountain trout streams in Kansas. (There are hills in the eastern third, but the west is absolutely flat.)

Wow! I wonder why I couldn't think of all those. I guess its probably because my granpa (mamma's dad) was a vegetarian since he was forty or something! So my granny never used to cook anything delicious.

My my other granny used to cook many wonderful things. I miss her food!