A post came up in my Facebook feed alerting me to the fact that the Iowa Pork Council would announce the ‘best’ pork tenderloin in Iowa tomorrow. And I realized that I was actually very interested! Haha.
While the judges will never get the opportunity to taste the tenderloin at Joe’s Diner in Bellingwood, there are many, many great restaurants in the state that serve awesome tenderloins.
When I was in high school, I worked at a Tastee Freez on Highway 92. Mort and Julie had a goldmine there. Every kid in town walked in those doors for great food and ice cream. It was a dream job for me. They were great people and I learned so much from them.
Thursday mornings were when we made tenderloins. Julie and I (or whoever was working that day) sliced meat into 1/4 quarter pound chunks and then we started pounding. These babies turned into immense, plate-sized pieces of meat that we then dredged, breaded and froze for the next week’s sales. Mort had to buy larger buns because the regular size hamburger buns looked absolutely ridiculous on those monsters.
You know it’s wonderful food when you look forward to making one for yourself. They were fabulous.
That job was my first real job.
I’d done a little babysitting. Let’s just say that wasn’t going to be my dream job. Jim, Carol and I were pretty close in age – I didn’t grow up with little kids around me. Everybody thought that the minister’s daughter would be a great caregiver for their children. Ummm … not so much. I worked for three different families, each job letting me know that this was more horror than I needed. From the infant with horrible, stinky, runny blue poop (her dad was the local doctor and she’d been sick, so was on some medication) … I had to prop the box of Pampers up beside me to figure out how to change the horrible diaper, to the little girl who pulled her cloth diaper off. I had no directions for that one so I called Mom in a panic to come over and put a new diaper on the child. Her brother literally climbed the walls in their hallway, cackling and screaming the entire time. That was awful. And finally, I got to one more family whose children had run through every single babysitter in town. Yeah. I worked for them several times until Carol was old enough to take over and then I was done.
I soon discovered that teaching beginner piano lessons was a much better way to make a few dollars. Kids came and went in under forty-five minutes and I didn’t have to do any real dirty work. I operated from my father’s request and did my best to make their learning fun. I’m a much better teacher than babysitter. (Yeah, yeah – you can make comments about how teachers have to do both jobs these days. Have you noticed I’m not teaching in a public school?)
My first really fun outside job was working at the Tastee Freez. What was yours?
