The Redneck Guide to Raisin' Children (5 page)

4. Dolly Parton (
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
)

Lip-Smackin' Snacks for Kids

It's outrageous, but true: These days, cookies and candy cost more than a box of snuff. Moon Pies and Little Debbie cakes are about the only bargains left in stores.

Instead of wasting all that money on store-bought treats, make your own snacks at home using Annie's simple recipes:

• Dip chunks of Spam in candy-apple sauce, stick a toothpick in each chunk, and put a plateful in the refrigerator. They'll go faster than fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches at a convention of Elvis impersonators.

• Whip up homemade carrot candy faster than your kids can say “Bugs Bunny.” Just slice some carrots and fry them in butter. Then mix in a batch of brown maple sugar and a little water to make a syrup.

Take the candy out of the skillet and let the sticky coat harden. If your young'uns don't lose all their teeth from eating carrot candy, they'll love it and won't ever ask for Gummi Possums again.

• In the winter, treat your kids to “snow cream”—which is merely ice cream made with snow. Fill bowls with new-fallen snow, pour on some Carnation canned evaporated milk and some sugar, and mix the stuff up real good with a spoon.

One word of warning: Steer clear of scooping snow from anywhere close to the outhouse. You might end up carrying that “all-natural ingredients” craze a bit too far.

• Make your own yummy cookies using graham crackers—which was one of Reverend Billy's greatest inventions ever.

Get a box of cheap store-brand graham crackers and smear some potted meat on them. The crackers will satisfy your kids' sweet tooth. And the potted meat will provide their Recommended Daily Allowances of cooked pork fatty tissue, beef tripe, and vinegar.

 

Rednecks' Five Favorite Restaurants

1. Denny's (cheap Grand Slams)

2. Shoney's (all-you-can-eat breakfast bar)

3. Stuckey's (yummy pecan desserts)

4. Waffle House (great cheese 'n' onion hashbrowns)

5. Mom's Kitchen, Lake Worth, Florida (try Mike's ribeye steak omelet!)

The Real Dirt on Eatin' Right

Little redneck young'uns also like to eat dirt, and there's plenty of it in the nursery. Go ahead and let 'em chow down—dirt is packed with nutrition!

Rufus McKinney's old lady, Aldie, says she read somewhere that all the minerals a body needs are found in plain old dirt. So why waste money on store-bought “supplement” pills?

But if you live in Georgia, don't let your kids eat too much red clay. It'll clog up their innards and give them such a god-awful case of constipation that you'll have to call Roto-Rooter.

Supplement their dirt intake every now and then with some milk and blackberries to keep 'em in real good shape. Buttermilk's good, too.

One of the healthiest country dishes is “killed” greens. Pick some kale or lettuce, fry a few strips of bacon, and pour the hot grease over the greens. When they wither up like worms on hot concrete, they're ready to eat.

This Is Your Brain on Fried Eggs

Kids need more than snacks and dirt to keep 'em going after they get past three. And the saying at our house is “Give a damn—give 'em Spam.”

To rednecks, Spam is nature's most perfect food. We figure nine out of ten cans of Spam are sold in the South (the other can gets shoplifted in New York City).

There's a good reason Spam is so popular among rednecks. You can fix it more ways than Forrest Gump can fix shrimp, with the comforting knowledge that Spam never wriggled around like them creepy little shrimps do.

The label on a Spam can won't tell you exactly what's inside, but that's only because the makers are afraid their tasty secret recipe will get out and cheap foreign imitations will come pouring into the country.

Now, you've got to be aware that Spam ain't no diet food. Every can contains ninety-six grams of fat. So if your kids are porking up, switch to Spam Lite—which has a mere forty-eight fat grams.

Spam—the unofficial state vegetable of Georgia—can be prepared so many ways it's unbelievable. Here's a sample menu of Annie's daily meals at our house:

Breakfast
—Cut a can of Spam into quarter-inch slices, slap them in the skillet, and fry until they're turning crispy. Throw in some eggs, fry sunny side up until the edges are brown, and dump the Spam and eggs on your young'uns' plates.

Don't forget that every redneck family's breakfast table has to have a giant jar of apple butter on it. In Tennessee, some parents have been arrested for child neglect because they forgot the apple butter.

And you've got to have hot biscuits and real butter for breakfast—plus a jar of ketchup for the rowdy boys who like to make their Spam look fresh killed.

Dinner
(which Yankees call “lunch”)—Make some cold Spam sandwiches with Wonder Bread, cheap mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomatoes. Serve with grape Kool-Aid.

Supper
(“dinner”)—Finely chop two cans of Spam and mash all the meat together with two eggs (take off the shells first), four ripped-up slices of bread, a chopped onion, and a big bunch of ketchup. Whack the pile into a loaf shape with a big wooden spoon and bake the thing until it's brown on top.

Serve the Spam loaf with canned green beans—Luck's brand if you can get 'em—and mashed potatoes made from scratch.

If you parents would sometimes like to have a romantic dinner at home after getting the kids to bed, light a little birthday candle on the table and treat the two of you to a couple of fine wine coolers.

Outside Dinin'

Never go to a restaurant that doesn't offer a “value” meal. And if it doesn't have a drive-through window, keep on driving until you find one that does.

Set-down restaurants always cost twice as much (unless it's Denny's). And if the menu's got a fancy tassel hanging from it, add ten dollars per person per tassel inch.

Here's another way to spot expensive restaurants: The name is always misspelled. Never chow down at a place that's got Ristorante or Centre or Olde on the sign outside. You're bound to be overcharged—because if these people can't spell, they sure can't add your bill right.

Rufus McKinney learned the hard way about arm-and-a-leg restaurants. When he drove his family up to Ohio to see his wife's cousin four years ago, he decided to live it up and took them to a highfalutin French restaurant. Big mistake.

Rufus says his kids pigged out on dujour soup and whores devours, and the bill was more than his whole weekly paycheck from the egg-packing plant!

The poor man had to have a Happy Meal to cheer up. (Come to think of it, why does McDonald's have a Happy Meal, but Burger King has a cross san'wich?)

You're more apt to get good prices and good food at a truck stop. Or a restaurant that's got a sign saying Buses Welcome. But be careful if all the buses in the parking lot say State Prison on the side.

Lastly, stay clear of diners that advertise a “family atmosphere.” Hell, who wants to put up with kids screaming and grabbing food while you're trying to eat?

Moonshine and Other Medications

Childhood is a minefield of pesky and even dangerous illnesses. There's not a kid alive who hasn't nearly died from the whooping cough, measles, mumps, the flu, and hundreds of colds.

Why, if we'd kept all the snot our kids blew out of their noses while they were growing up, we'd be able to fill up the town's big elevated water tank.

Which would have made it interesting when the townsfolk took baths.

Of course, dirty ol' Rufus McKinney never woulda noticed.

When your young'uns come down with a cold or the flu, you can buy all kinds of over-the-counter medications down at the Piggly Wiggly market. But that stuff's expensive and usually won't help a bit, so we recommend treating the kids with your own homemade preparations.

Here are some of our favorites, guaranteed to work:

• Dissolve some rock sugar in a warm glass of moonshine, add a twist of lemon if you've got one, and give your kids a little sip to break a fever. Don't let them overdo the sipping, though, or pretty soon they'll start pestering you to bring in a jukebox and will get into a brawl with their brothers.

• Mix up some yellow sulfur and pure hog lard. Smear it on a clear clean cloth to make a poultice, and apply this to your child's chest when she's got any kind of chest cold.

A sulfur-lard plaster also is a cure for athlete's feet on people and the mange on dogs. Maybe even athlete's feet on dogs.

• A good remedy for constipation is a green apple. This will loosen up a kid's innards within minutes, and he'll spend more time in the outhouse than the Sears catalog.

Home First Aid for Kids

Once your children wear out a snot rag, wash it real good and tear it into strips to use as bandages for small cuts or tourniquets for snakebites or real blood-gusher gashes.

If your kid loses a toe or finger in a bicycle accident, whittle him a new one out of wood. Tape it on the stub and warn him that this time he'd better take care of it!

Do your young'uns have stinking feet? Wash them in bleach and water to kill the smell. Then throw the kid in the dryer and spin him around a few minutes.

A good home treatment for a burn is to slice a cold raw potato and hold it against the burned spot. (Don't try this with a hot french fry.)

To protect your brood's health all year round, give them a big spoonful of castor oil each fall and a dose of cod liver oil every spring.

These awful-tasting preventives are what our parents inflicted on us when we were growing up, and we almost never got sick—or at least admitted it for fear they'd whip out the bottles again.

Another easy preventive is frying all your kids' food in pure lard.

We're convinced that lard and fat keep people from catching colds. Eskimos eat blubber all the time—and we've never in our lives seen an Eskimo with a runny nose.

Stuttering

Don't worry about it. Mel Tillis's stutter made him a fortune in country music and the
Smokey
movies. Maybe your kid can do the same.

Nine Greatest Redneck Tragedies

Your kids might expect life to always be filled with fun and games. You've got to warn them to expect a few bumps in the road every now and then—otherwise they'll be completely unprepared when trouble strikes.

So sit down with your young'uns and carefully go over this list of the nine worst calamities that could loom in their future:

1.
Loss of a wife.

2.
Loss of a cousin (See 1).

3.
Loss of a cinder block.

4.
Losing a wheel on your home while moving.

5.
Watching a deadbeat drive away without paying, sticking you with his bill, while you're on duty at the gas station.

6.
Having to sell your coon dog because he's gone deaf and you ain't got the money for a hearing aid.

7.
Your pickup truck blows a head gasket.

8.
Loss of a husband.

9.
Suffering a horrible hemorrhoid attack on a hard church bench.

10.
Flicking your cigarette ashes between your legs while sitting on the commode, then realizing the hot ashes didn't hit the water.

11.
Losing a show 'n' tell contest at work to see who's got the most teeth.

12.
Getting your meat freezer stolen off your front porch.

Redneck's hideaway

 

Outhouse Dos and Don'ts

The outhouse is disappearing fast in America, which is a shame because we personally don't believe in indoor bathrooms.

We think it's disgusting that people do their business right down the hall from where they cook their food.

Our outhouse sits proudly on the hill behind our home, and it's been there for over fifty years. Our grandparents used it, our parents used it, we used it, and, God willing, our kids will still be using it long after we've walked through the pearly gates.

Here's what to teach your young'uns about the proper use of the outhouse:

• Don't wipe with a page ripped straight out of the catalog. Crumple up the page over and over until it's soft.

• Always shut the door completely in the wintertime, or else the cold wind will whip inside and leave you with a big icicle on your most private private part.

If you're a girl, people might mistake you for a boy until the icicle melts—and if you're a boy, the girls will stare and flirt.

• On Halloween night, post a guard on the outhouse so juvenile delinquents won't push it over. Grandma's weak bladder makes her go at all hours of the night, and her heart might not be able to take being suddenly horizontal.