While the two of them were occupied by table setting, I started the potatoes boiling. I didn’t bother with peeling them. The peels were healthy, Old Mother had told me. She’d often lectured me about not removing the most nutritional parts of the root vegetables. I hoped Mrs. Penn and the others wouldn’t object. The village families just thought I was being lazy when I left the skins on their potatoes.
I had fresh cucumbers which I grated for a salad, along with some carrots. The boys weren’t fond of that, but then, as I’d said, they were still at the stage where vegetables were the enemy, to be endured and swallowed down so they could get to the good stuff, like cookies and candy.
I sliced some bread and made roast beef sandwiches. That should appease the meat-eating doctor. I opened up some pickles for him, too. He doted on dill pickles for some reason. I thought them overly salty and preferred, like the boys, the bread and butter pickles, although I’d never understood why they were called that since they contained zero butter.
I chopped the potatoes and added the rest of the ingredients for the potato salad, making it exactly like Mrs. Penn did. Mrs. Higgins in the village had often put bacon grease in hers. Mr. Spanning wanted his to have boiled eggs, and some of the other villagers demanded special spices that Mrs. Penn didn’t care for. Wasn’t it interesting how tastes differed?
Speaking of food preferences, I mashed some baked beans from the dinner the night before and made my own sandwich, adding a juicy tomato and a few slices of dill pickle. It was rather a weird combination, but I thought it worth a try. I also gave myself a handful of watercress, which the grocery had delivered that morning. Yum.
Carlo got the job of running upstairs to deliver the message that lunch was ready. While he was doing that, I let the officer pour lemonade. (Although Mrs. Penn usually required the boys to drink milk at every meal, I thought they’d enjoy some lemonade for lunch. I’d insist they drink milk with their snack later today. That would go great with the oatmeal cookies (with raisins) I’d made the day before.)
When everyone was seated at the table, we dug in. Nobody complained about the potato skins in the potato salad, and the doctor ate four dill pickles! Mrs. Penn, although her appetite wasn’t fully back to normal, seemed to enjoy her half a sandwich, and she complimented everything, including the lemonade. She made no comment about the boys not drinking milk with their lunch. I was quite content that lunch had gone so well.
At least, I was until . . .