Well, yesterday’s sunshine has been washed away by an hours-long thunderstorm that woke me at 6:00 am and seems to have settled right over my house for the duration. It is very dark and wet with intermittent startling bursts of lightning and the grumpy follow-up of growling thunder and I am trying Very Hard to tamp down my School Is Actually Starting Anxiety. So I am retreating into happy memories – forcibly, this time – and still dreamily eating my way through my childhood summers. The food nostalgia is real strong, folks.
Let’s talk about food!
Today, for Labor Day, we are having ribs (it will be very fun and soggy to grill them if the downpour continues) and lemony potato salad.
(As an aside, potato salad is one of my Family Tradition Foods. We had it several times a year when I was growing up: New Year’s Day, Super Bowl Sunday, Fourth of July, Labor Day. My mom makes the BEST potato salad – it’s got a mustard base so it’s a nice sunny yellow, and it’s speckled with little bits of pickles and celery and red peppers and also – hork – hard boiled egg. My mom performs some sort of magical chopping technique on the egg so that it becomes dust and I barely even notice it. The potato salad is amazing and when I go to visit her, she makes a big batch of it and I eat it for breakfast. There is NOTHING that beats my mom’s cold potato salad for breakfast, you have to trust me. But even though she hand-wrote a copy of the recipe for me, I cannot make it so that it tastes the way her potato salad tastes. There must be something special she does, or maybe she doesn’t measure the ingredients as exactly as the recipe implies, or maybe she includes some sort of special ingredient like – hork – love. Whatever it is, I cannot replicate the flavor. So I have found my own potato salad recipe that I love but which tastes NOTHING like my mom’s. So even though it is Tradition to eat potato salad on Labor Day, it doesn’t really feel like tradition, because we’re not eating the traditional potato salad. Have I used the words tradition and potato salad often enough to create semantic satiation?)
(My family is still sort of floundering to find our own Family Tradition Foods. Even for Thanksgiving and Christmas, we haven’t really settled on specific meals that are so good we want to eat them every year forever and ever amen. And that’s okay! I think variety is wonderful! But I also have such fond food-related memories of holidays growing up. The foods we ate at specific times throughout the year took on such significance – and eating something like my mom’s potato salad can bring so much warmth and happiness flooding back that I would love to create the same kind of thing for Carla. Of course, there’s the added hiccup that Carla doesn’t EAT anything, so…)
(Family Tradition Foods must be a thing for other families, too, yes? Do you have any that you remember with fondness? Or horkitude, I suppose – I’d be interested to know about the Special Food your dad made every September First that only he liked to eat, or, like, the hot dish Aunt Violetta used to bring to every family barbecue that you all pretended to love, but would dump behind the shrubbery at the earliest opportunity, or whatever.)
Back to the Labor Day holiday pigging: my husband made these AMAZING brownie crinkle cookies for dessert. We may have eaten some yesterday already. You know. To make sure they weren’t poisonous, and weren’t going to ruin the holiday or anything. They are so fudgy and delicious. You should make them immediately.
Here’s what else is on this week’s menu. Spoiler alert: it’s full of comfort food.
Dinners for the Week of September 7-13
- Barbecued Ribs and Lemony Potato Salad
- Spaghetti
- First Day of Second Grade Special Meal: Breakfast for Dinner
- Oven Baked Pork Chops with Steamed Broccoli and Mac and Cheese
- Balsamic Pork Tenderloin with Caramelized Onions and Rice
- Arugula Salad with Grilled Shrimp
- Takeout
As I have already mentioned, several times, Carla is starting in-person school this week. She goes to a very small private school that has expended significant money and thought into how to make in-person school work safely for all involved. We feel hopeful and grateful and that this is the best decision we can make for our family at this time… but I am still nervous. Any and all distractions, especially but not limited to food-related memories or your dinner plans for this week, would be MOST welcome and appreciated.
My most nostalgic childhood foods are desserts. Angel food cake for birthdays, chocolate yule log for Christmas. My family was very meat-and-potatoes, so I don’t have…great memories with regards to Family Tradition Foods. Sometimes I will see something that reminds me so much of church potlucks, and it won’t be that I LIKED those foods – jelly salads, or what have you – but it will give me a nice warm remembering feeling.
My mom also made a mustard based potato salad – I don’t believe there was egg in there – but who knows? When I was growing up we always had ham for Easter. And for most holidays and/or events there were always deviled eggs. Can someone please explain to me how it is possible to love deviled eggs but not really care for hard boiled eggs? It’s an age long mystery. Man-Child is VERY much a food traditionalist and will waste no time in informing us what MUST be on the menu for each holiday/event – he never deviates.
Yum! I love food traditions. I just convinced my mom to make whoopie pies to take on our non-traditional labor day weekend trip (usually we beach, this year we mountained). It’s not family beach week without whoopie pies, homemade Chex mix, and at least 2 pound cakes.
Growing up, my family always are shrimp creole for Christmas Eve supper. Now, we go to/help host a Christmas Eve Soup party. For the first few years of the soup party, we had shrimp creole on Christmas Adam.
I’m extremely mustard- and mayonnaise-averse, so I have never eaten potato salad in all my 56 years!
My dad was 100% Italian so pasta figured at all holidays, and I still do that at my own holiday dinners. We call spaghetti sauce ‘gravy’ and it was always fun if there was a new person joining us for Thanksgiving dinner and we asked them to pass the gravy. They’d pass the brown gravy, and we’d have to say, “No, the red gravy please.” 🙂 (We always had turkey and all the trimmings, plus manicotti, meatballs and sausage.)
I would also like to say how much I enjoy your posts — your writing is lovely and lyrical. I’m always happy to see a new post from you!
Food is a terrific topic. My mom also made DELICIOUS potato salad. I loved it warm and cold. I’ve come upon a hybrid of 2 recipes that produces a reasonable facsimile. We always had a cross-cut ham with pineapple rings along with potato salad at Easter.
We ate traditional turkey and dressing for Thanksgiving, but my husband’s family had those AND ham AND chicken and dumplings. So we have incorporated those into our Thanksgiving now too. I mistakenly thought that his mom was simply choosing to contribute those since I handled the turkey and dressing. The first Thanksgiving after she died, we didn’t have those, and my FIL requested them for next time. I made it up to him at Christmas and every Thanksgiving after.
In the last few years of his life, my dad would bring a grape salad to EVERY get together. It was fine, but no one requested it. In fact, there were times we’d request something else, and he’d tell us no, that he was bringing grape salad. Lastly, when I was a pre-teen, my mom was in the hospital for an extended time. My dad learned to make soft tacos (we usually had crunchy) “just like Taco Bell”, but for some reason, they had to be JUST LIKE TB. Meat, lettuce, cheese – no substitutes or additions. It was so weird, and we had them a LOT while my mom was gone.