Down to Earth dinner

Each chapter in She Flew the Coop has it's own name, and the first chapter after the prologue is called Down to Earth.
In this chapter we meet one of the main protagonists Vangie Nepper a self proclaimed homemaker, accomplished gardener and home cook.
We get to hear through her own thoughts and daydreams whilst gardening how she ended up with the life she now. Not a bad life, but a life with something missing none the less.
Vangies tells ups that she was raised to be a housewife and make her husband happy by her mum, yet it was her dad she aspired to be like the most. This is shown to us by her wanting to go flying with her beloved father when he's crop dusting when she was little, yet somehow this part of her got lost through the years.
In this chapter we also have a story about how on her 23rd wedding anniversary she invited all her neighbours to a cookout much against her husbands wishes who is miserly with both money and emotions.
The description of this meal got my mouth watering.....

"I baked a pork tenderloin, sliced it Texas-style, and then made a barbecue sauce from scratch.

 The recipe got wrote up in the newspaper- it was that mouthwatering.

I fixed potato salad, slaw, devilled eggs, baked beans, and fresh string beans from my own garden."

Sounds delicious doesn't it? I had to try and make my own version of this for my book inspired meal, I then remembered that in Consuming Passions that there was a recipe for barbecue sauce and also one for potato salad, something I can never get enough of in all it's variations.

I then had to find a recipe for homemade baked beans, I wasn't going to be able to do a whole barbecue and I can't afford to treat all my neighbours anyway.

I found the answer in one of my cookbooks called Home Food by Richard Whittington, this book has loads of recipes from around the world from home cooks. And right there in the section on the US of A was a recipe for slow-fried pork steaks with boston baked beans.
So along with my adaption of this recipe i made potato salad, home made barbecue sauce, summer coleslaw and green beans not grown in my own garden.

I don't often cook meals that are so time intensive even though I really enjoy cooking and it made me think about how the characters in the book must feel about domesticity.

To be told that this is the best way to show how much you love someone is depressing, yet these women used it to their own advantage and expressed themselves through the domestic sphere. Even better yet is that when the women eventually break free of their own prisons they don't suddenly stop doing what they used to like doing, they're just doing it for themselves now.

I love the idea of that, as when I'm cooking or doing anything like that I'm doing it for my own amusement and just hoping that others are enjoying it too.

I haven't got any pictures of the meal I'm afraid but I'll give you the recipes for all of the recipes over the next few days along with drawings of how it kinda looked.