The Accidental Casserole

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A Note From The Porch

It was a typical busy late afternoon. Carl and Scott were home from work, and I was in the process of starting dinner. 

I gathered the ingredients together, which included a forage into the garage where our overflow pantry and freezers are located. 

I came back to the kitchen and started assembling dinner. 

Mom always made sure there were at least three different things for dinner, followed up by a dessert of some kind. 

Since she is the one who taught me to cook, I did the same. It worked equally well when there were six of us for dinner as well as just for the three of us after our other three children moved out and established their own homes. 

One of the dishes we were having that night was a corn casserole, a recipe Mom had given me many years before.

After I assembled the casserole and put it in the oven, I put together the rest of the meal and began tidying up the kitchen. 

The corn casserole calls for a box of Jiffy Corn Muffin mix. I picked up the empty box to throw it away and froze. 

Emblazoned across the front of the box it clearly said Jiffy Yellow Cake mix. 

I froze, horrified by the discovery. I had just ruined dinner!

Trying to decide what I was going to feed the guys, I decided the best thing to do was to make a new corn casserole, this time with Jiffy Corn Muffin mix. It would only delay dinner by a few minutes, since it was very quick to put together. I had enough ingredients on hand. 

Less than 15 minutes later, I slid a new casserole into the oven satisfied that I had saved dinner. 

I had every intention of throwing the accidental casserole out. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to eat a cake with creamed corn, cheddar cheese and green chiles in it. 

Except… Carl and Scott both said they wanted to taste it. 

I thought they were teasing me at first but quickly found out they were serious. 

So I gave them each a serving, fully expecting them to take one bite and push it away.

They didn’t.

They liked it.

So, now I was curious and tasted it, too. 

I was shocked to find out it was actually good. 

We have always liked a little bit of sugar in our cornbread, so I suppose it wasn’t such a stretch to think they might like the sweetness of the cake in it. 

Fifteen minutes later, when the actual corn casserole came out of the oven, they weren’t interested in it. They had polished off the accidental casserole, so I saved the right one for dinner the next night. 

We have talked about the incident at different times over the years. The horror of what I had done soon wore off, and now I find it funny, too. 

But I never made another one with a cake mix. 

I learned several things from the incident. 

  • Mistakes are not always failures.
  • Sometimes the “ruined” thing becomes the memorable thing.
  • Family stories often come from ordinary kitchen accidents.
  • Perfection is overrated when people are laughing and eating.
  • Always read the label. Jiffy Cake Mix and Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix look remarkably alike, and you may end up with an accidental casserole of your own.

In case you are curious, I have listed the original recipe below. And if you decide to substitute a cake mix for the corn muffin mix? I won’t tell anyone. 

Corn Casserole

Prep Time: 10 minutes  | Cook Time: 45-60 minutes  | Total Time: 55-70 minutes  | Servings: 4-6 

Ingredients:

  • 3 eggs
  • ¼ cup oil
  • 2 cans creamed corn
  • 4 oz. can of chopped green chiles
  • 8 oz Jiffy corn bread mix
  • ¾ – 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (for topping)

Ingredients:

  • Preheat oven to 350℉.
  • Combine all ingredients, except cheddar cheese, in bowl, beating eggs before adding the rest. 
  • Pour into a casserole dish. Top with cheddar cheese. 
  • Bake for 45-60 minutes or until the center is set. 

NOTE: If you like a little spice, add a few jarred jalapeno pepper slices and a tablespoon or two of the liquid.

Watching Mom Crochet

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Mom was sitting on the end of our black sectional sofa, the one with silver threads running through it, crocheting a doily. It wasn’t the first time I had seen her crochet—but it was the first time I really paid attention.

I sat down beside her to watch.

She was working with dark pink and forest green crochet thread, two of her favorite colors.

I wanted to understand how she formed the stitches that made the doily grow. Her quick hand movements—and the steady progress of the piece—fascinated me.

I watched her for a long time that day. And after that, whenever she sat down to crochet, I often sat beside her to watch.

I couldn’t figure out how she did it, but I wanted to learn.

She didn’t think my seven-year-old hands would be able to manage a tiny steel hook and thread, so she gave me a blue plastic crochet hook and a ball of bright pink yarn.

She taught me how to make a chain stitch. I used up most of that yarn making one very long chain.

She tried to show me how to turn those chains into something more, but I lost interest before I had much success. It would be years before I picked it up again.

Later, when I was about eleven, a friend taught me to knit in garter stitch. I made a lot of knitted headbands that year.

In my late teens, I picked knitting up again for a while—but I was never completely comfortable working with two needles.

It felt awkward.

That’s when I turned back to crochet.

I taught myself the basic stitches from a book and quickly realized that working with a single hook felt far more natural.

As I became more invested, I learned advanced techniques and began making hats, baby blankets, purses, mittens—even rugs.

Before long, I realized I could look at a finished piece and write a pattern from it.

That led to designing my own patterns.

Eventually, I became confident enough to submit them for publication.

The first few were turned down, but I was determined. Each rejection taught me something. I studied my work, paid attention to what publishers were accepting, and adjusted.

Before long, more and more of what I submitted was accepted.

That was the beginning of what became a decades-long career in crochet design.

Rose Garden, a doily I designed many years later. Mom would have loved this one.

In 2004, that path led me to accept an editorial position with a Midwest craft publishing company, where I worked for several years before retiring.

I have long since lost track of that first ball of bright pink yarn—but I still have the blue plastic crochet hook Mom gave me.

Over the years, I’ve collected many hooks—favorites I reach for again and again—but none of them compare to that simple blue plastic one.

That one holds the memories.

Memories of sitting beside Mom as she worked with a tiny steel hook, creating what felt like magic out of thin air.

I’ve often told people that Mom taught me to crochet, because she was the first to put a hook in my hands.

She always gently corrected me, saying it was the other way around—that I taught her by passing along what I had learned.

Either way, she was my inspiration in crochet—and in so many other things in life.

And to think… it all started with watching Mom crochet.

Dancing With Dad

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Mom and Dad met at a dance in the late 1940s, after World War II.

They loved dancing. On Saturday nights, they sometimes went out with friends. Their favorite place was the Coliseum in Davenport, Iowa—later renamed the Col Ballroom.

They especially loved waltzes and had a number of records they played at home.

We were lucky to have older cousins who could babysit Monty and me.

Eventually, they stopped going to the Col when the music shifted from Big Band to pop.

But their love of dancing never changed.

Some evenings, they would put on records and dance right there in the living room. Waltzes were always their favorite.

One evening, they set the record player on a table in the little dinette area tucked into one corner of the room.

I can still see it—the black sectional couch with silver threads running through it, the arched doorways of our mid-century modern home, the kitchen at the far end.

I wanted to dance too, but I didn’t know how.

Then, to my delight, Dad asked me to dance.

He told me to step up onto his feet—we were both in our socks. Mom put The Blue Danube on the record player, and suddenly we were waltzing around the room.

I don’t know how he made it look so effortless—especially with me standing on his feet—but he did.

The next dance was for Mom.

I sat quietly on the couch, watching them, listening to the music, taking it all in.

It’s an evening I’ve never forgotten.

The Pony and the Pig Wallow

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There are some lessons you only learn once—preferably not in a pig wallow. 

I was seven when I learned that if a pony puts his head down, the rider keeps going. It was my first lesson in physics. 

One minute I was riding bareback, with nothing to hang onto but the pony’s mane. The next, I was in the pig wallow.

I did not see it coming. One moment I was upright and feeling quite capable. The next, I was flat on my back in something warm, muddy, and unmistakably pig-related.

Pig-yuck was dripping from the top of my head to my toes.

I wasn’t hurt, but I was—stunned. I had to take my glasses off so I could see, because they were covered in that same pig-yuck. 

I wasn’t far from the house, so I climbed over the fence and walked up to the back door. 

I yelled for Mom. I knew better than to walk into the house like that.

Mom came to the door. The look on her face was one of pure horror. She didn’t say much besides “What did you do?”—sort of loudly.

I tried to explain, but by then she had turned the garden hose on me…

She hosed me down starting at the top of my head, then stripped my clothes off, and hosed me down again. 

Then she wrapped a bath towel around me and carried me to the bathtub so I wouldn’t get the floor all dirty. 

By this age, I was old enough to take my own bath, but not that day. She gave me one. Then she drained the bathtub and gave me another. 

That was the last time I rode the neighbor’s pony without permission. Physics and pig-yuck are persuasive teachers. 

My Teacher Saved My Life

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I was seven years old when I asked my teacher about the mole on her arm.

She had dark hair and fair skin, like me. I had freckles—lots of them—and I was curious. Children are not subtle. If we notice something, we ask about it.

Instead of brushing off my question, she answered gently.

She told me that because I had so many freckles, I should keep an eye on them. She pointed to one on my upper arm in particular and said I should watch it in case it ever wanted to be something else.

She didn’t frighten me.

She didn’t lecture me.

She simply planted a seed of awareness.

And I listened.

For two days, I tried to remember her name.

Then I said her first name out loud—Mary Jane—and “Clawson” came back immediately. I have always liked her name.

Thirty years later, I remembered.

I was thirty-eight years old when that freckle on my upper arm began to change. It developed tiny flecks of blue that hadn’t been there before. It didn’t look dramatic. It didn’t hurt. But it didn’t look the same anymore.

Because of what she had told me when I was seven, I had watched it over the years. Not obsessively. Just attentively.

Around that same time, my youngest son didn’t want to go to school one morning. He said he felt sick. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed him, but I took him to the doctor that day.

By the time we were in the exam room, he seemed fine. The doctor couldn’t find anything wrong. Since we were already there, I asked him to look at the freckle on my arm.

He examined it once—just once—and scheduled me for surgery.

It was malignant melanoma.

Scott was eight at the time. The other kids were teenagers, but they still needed their mother.

So I did what needed to be done.

The surgeon removed the melanoma along with a generous margin of surrounding tissue. I carry the scar on my upper left arm to this day, and another on my leg from the skin graft that closed the wound.

I was seven when Mary Jane Clawson told me to watch that freckle.

I was thirty-eight when I remembered.

She never knew what her quiet advice would mean to me.

But I did.

And I am still here.

The Train Tracks In Our Front Yard

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Just beyond the boundary of our front yard, a railroad track ran east toward Viola and west toward Aledo. We were in between the two, but closer to Aledo.

Dad and Monty always kept our yard neatly mowed. But the strip along the tracks — the part that belonged to the railroad — was left alone. There weren’t many weeds, just tall grass.

Monty and I liked to play in it. We would mash the grass down with our feet, and those flattened spots became forts or little houses.

We spent many summer afternoons there, in the sunshine and fresh air, pretending.

Sometimes a train would come by. They didn’t go very fast, and they weren’t very long. Most were only eight or ten cars — sometimes less, sometimes more — and always with a caboose.

We knew to stay back in the yard and away from the tracks when the trains passed.

Later, I learned that it was a spur line, and the trains were delivering freight to local businesses.

Sometimes the engineer had his window open, with his arm resting on the sill. We waved, and they often waved back.

Sometimes, a handcar would come along, with two men pumping the handles to make it go.

We always thought those were funny to watch.

Echoes of The Past

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I have written much about being a little girl and growing up on the farm in the early part of my life. There are so many memories that are still very vivid for me.

One of the things that stands out so clearly is the sound of Dad’s tractor. He owned a Massey-Harris tractor, which was a common sight in those days. They were solid, simple machines that looked very different from the modern tractors sold today.


The engine of those tractors made a steady, rhythmic sound that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else.

I remember playing in the yard and listening to it. Knowing that Mom was in the kitchen, and being able to hear Dad working in the fields made me feel safe.

I liked hearing it, but after moving from the farm I never heard it again. As the years passed, I assumed I never would.

Until… One day, about thirty-five years later. I was standing in my kitchen with the windows open. I was home alone, and it was spring planting time.

Suddenly, I heard the distinctive put-put-put of that engine once again, and I was suddenly six years old again listening for my Dad working in the fields.

But this time it wasn’t Dad’s tractor. It was one that a neighbor had acquired.

For several years afterward, I welcomed the sound of that tractor every spring. For a few minutes I was transported back to a time of innocence long ago.

Ironically, Carl purchased another Massey-Harris tractor sometime in the 1980s to use for cutting and hauling firewood, but the engine was bad. He replaced it with the engine he took out of his 1969 Pontiac Firebird when he sent it to the scrap yard, but that is a story for another day.

Listening to the Little Kids Read

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When I was in second grade, Mrs. Clawson asked me to help the younger children learn to read.

She gave me a copy of the reader they were using and told me which story they were working on. Since it was the same reader I had used the year before, I already knew the stories.

The desks were lined up in neat rows, all facing the blackboard.

I would pull a little chair up beside a student’s desk and listen while they read out loud. When a child came to a word they didn’t know, I encouraged them to sound it out. If that didn’t help, I would tell them the word.

There was something satisfying, even at the age of seven, about being able to help.

I really enjoyed it — and I was proud that Mrs. Clawson trusted me to do it.

Of course, I had my own work to do, but if I finished early and she needed someone to listen to the first graders read, she would ask if I would like to help. I always did.

The next year, when I started third grade, I moved to a different classroom. Even then, there were times when Mrs. Clawson asked my new teacher, Miss Nesbitt, if I could come back and listen to her students read.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I suppose that was my first experience as a tutor.

Mom vs the School Superintendent

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The superintendent said, “No.”

Mom said, “Want to bet?”

In the 1950s, our school district, like so many others, had a strict dress code. Girls were required to wear dresses to school. No exceptions.

I liked wearing dresses, so that was fine — at least until winter came.

The school bus would not drive down our long driveway, so Monty and I had to walk out to the highway and wait for it to pick us up.

We had to make sure we got there first. If we missed the bus, we missed a day of school. We had only one car, and Dad took it to work.

Sometimes the wait stretched to fifteen or twenty minutes if the roads were icy or snowy and the bus was delayed.

In the worst part of winter, there was often severe cold and deep snow. One time, the wind was so fierce that Monty and I ducked into a snow cave that had formed along the drift just to get out of the wind.

Another time, the snow completely filled our driveway to the tops of the fence posts. Then a thick crust formed on top, and we had to walk across it to reach the highway.

I had several pairs of corduroy slacks, so Mom started putting them on me under my dress, with instructions to take them off and leave them with my coat and boots when I got to school.

The first day I wore them, Mrs. Clawson quietly and gently told me it was against the rules and that I shouldn’t do it again.

I told Mom when I got home that afternoon.

She didn’t say much to me about it, but she called the district superintendent. She explained that I would continue wearing slacks to school, but that I would remove them once I arrived in order to comply with school rules.

He didn’t like that at all.

He told her that once I stepped onto the school bus, school rules applied — and that I had to follow them.

Mom didn’t think so.

She explained about our walk to the highway, the long waits in the cold, and the winter weather. Then she told him that I would continue wearing slacks to school — whether he liked it or not.

I’m sure he didn’t like it.

But no one ever told me I couldn’t wear them again.

I continued wearing them until the weather warmed up, and I kept doing so as long as we lived there.

Mom didn’t brook any nonsense when it came to her kids. She didn’t start fights, but she always finished them.

I Gave My Dog Tonsillitis

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I was always susceptible to common childhood illnesses, such as strep throat, tonsillitis, and earaches. 

When I was twelve, I developed tonsillitis again. My doctor decided that it was finally time to take my tonsils out. He and Mom scheduled the surgery, but it was scheduled far enough ahead that I would have time to heal. He prescribed an antibiotic and we went home after Mom got the prescription filled.

I don’t remember exactly what time of year it was, but I think it was summer. I don’t remember having makeup school work. And since I was sick, Mom wouldn’t let me go outside. 

So, I was stuck in the house with only TV and my dog, Spunky, to keep me company. 

Spunky was a beautiful little blonde Pekingese dog with a sweet disposition and a strong preference for being wherever I happened to be.

Although he belonged to the whole family, Dad worked, Mom was busy taking care of us and the house, and my big brother was sixteen by then so he preferred to spend his time with his friends rather than his kid sister and the dog. 

But, that was okay. Spunky and I enjoyed each other’s company. 

A few days after I got sick, we began noticing that Spunky wasn’t acting like himself. He was lethargic and was barely eating. 

After a few days, Mom said he needed to go see Dr. Beer, our vet. I was well by then, so I went with her. 

After examining Spunky, Dr. Beer said he had tonsillitis. 

Mom and I looked at each other in surprise. 

That’s when Mom explained that I had just gotten over it. 

Dr. Beer said that he caught it from me—and that’s what I have believed all these years.

He rarely left my side. We were up in each other’s faces all the time. I used to kiss him on the mouth, and I’d been known to share occasional lollipops and Popsicles with him. And Mom had bought me some Popsicles while I was sick with tonsillitis…  

All these years later, I started wondering if it was really possible. I did some research and found that although it is rare, it can happen with bacterial tonsillitis. 

They specifically advised to avoid face kissing. 

Oops. 

I suspect it was probably frowned upon to share Popsicles and lollipops, too. 

At least Spunky didn’t have to have his tonsils out.