Food: A Family Tradition

My mom was a pretty good cook. She rarely made anything very fancy, except for holidays. She made a great turkey at Thanksgiving, but most of the time, she made simple things. In the midst of that, she managed to make some family traditions that centered around food.

In my family, Wednesday night was taco and bad joke night. If you didn't come to the table with a bad joke, you didn't get any tacos. And the tacos were about as unhealthy as you could imagine. We had the standard ground beef as filler, but the thing that made these tacos so bad for you was the shells. Mom would heat up a quart or so of oil and deep fry tortillas. Once they were a nice brown, she would use tongs to pull them out, literally streaming oil out of the bubbles that formed on the tortilla. After a brief trip to a paper towel, they were ready to eat.

On Sunday nights, we had breakfast for dinner. Fried eggs, bacon, and sourdough toast was the menu. We would take our plates into the family room, a rare treat to be in front of the TV instead of at the table. We would watch whatever Disney movie was on that evening. Looking back, my mom did that Sunday nights because it was the easiest thing for her leading up to the week. But I always looked forward to that dinner and the sense of specialness it carried.

Easter was always a big deal for my family, with lots of relatives coming over. The food I looked forward to the most was a giant pan of cinnamon rolls, which my mom would put in the shape of a lamb. The rolls ended up looking like the wool. They were just cinnamon rolls, but their rarity and shape made them unique to family sitting around the dining table and us young ones at the kids' table.

None of it very fancy or hard to make really, but all of it meaningful. 

I guess sometimes food is more than just what you eat.