Slice of Life is sponsored on Tuesdays by Two Writing Teachers. For the month of March we are posting a slice each day on our blog. Join in!
My
sister-in-law used to joke about our family dinners. It seems that we can never
just have steak and potatoes, for example. It might be steak, but with
Grandma’s Party Potatoes, or maybe June’s casserole, and my dad’s favorite Five
Egg White Supreme cake for dessert. In our family, stories are important, and
many stories are told through food.
Food helps
me remember those that have passed on as well. This morning I woke to a bark,
as I do most mornings. Bally needed to go out. I took her out and decided that
I might as well stay up and read for a bit. I had some tea and put some
homemade bread in the toaster to snack on while I read. Glancing at the bread I
thought of my grandmother, Mumsie. Each morning she would take what she called
a “hard roll” from the freezer and warm it up with some butter for her
breakfast.
After about
an hour, I paused in my book, and decided to have some hot chocolate. Our house
was chilly and quiet – and Bally and I were still the only two awake. Making
the hot chocolate brought back memories of my other grandmother. I remember
when she taught me to make the hot chocolate recipe, dumping the ingredients in
a paper grocery sack and shaking it vigorously to combine. She didn’t want to
dirty a dish she’d have to wash.
At lunch I
warmed up some mac and cheese and thought of Vel – my grandmother and
great-aunt’s good friend. (I wrote about her HERE.) Her mac and cheese recipe
is infamous and much requested at family dinners. When she gave me recipe cards
at my bridal shower, it was the first card I looked for.
My night
ended with a ham loaf for dinner, and my parent’s recipe for risotto. My dad
taught me to make it when I finally got interested in cooking – either during
college or right after. The ham loaf was a huge find. My great-aunt used to get
it in a tiny shop near her town.(I wrote about my great-aunt HERE.) I don’t travel there often so when I saw it in
a local butcher shop – which they had, in fact, purchased from the same spot my
aunt did, I snapped it up. Reading her recipe for the glaze that went on top, I
smiled.
These
ladies – my two grandmothers, my great-aunt, and Vel, were forces in my life. I
miss them each and every single day. I’m grateful for a family that names our
food after the folks that made it. A family that has stories about fried
chicken, homemade Kahlua, a coconut cake that we wish we had the recipe for, and more. I’m grateful for moments like
having a glass of hot chocolate by myself in the morning and having the chance
to remember my grandma, red-rimmed glasses and all.
I can’t
help but realize as I look over the recipes that fill my binder and my box –
the ones I know best, the ones that I can make from memory, are the ones with
the stories. The ones that I learned from the people I love, standing next to
them, telling stories, learning. The recipes from the cookbooks that I read on
my own never seem to mean the same thing. Isn’t this true in our classrooms
too? It all comes back to the relationship between the teacher and the student
– which is something I learned long ago around my family’s dinner table.
