Captain's Casserole

My mother was not the Donna Reed kind of mother. Though she was a stay-at-home mom, her priorities were not housework and cooking, but art.

As I have always been a creative person from a young age, not having warm from the oven cookies when I came home from school was balanced by having my own live-in art teacher.

When Mom applied her creativity to cooking, we had some interesting meals. Stir fried liver comes to mind, as disgusting as it sounds.

I recall sitting down to dinner, to another new recipe she'd found in a magazine, called Captain's Casserole.

It was noodles with tuna, black olives? and a crushed potato chip topping. Any other details are lost in the memory of how awful it was. Mom liked it, but it was a no for the rest of the family. As Dad put it, "This one's not a keeper."

For some reason, Captain's Casserole became a family joke, never to be forgotten. Even after more than fifty years, when I mentioned the name to my brother, he knew exactly what I was referring to.