I never drink coffee, which I find disgusting, and I only rarely drink tea. Aside from a stretch of college where I mainlined caffeine via Dr. Pepper, I've never needed caffeine to become awake in the morning. This is a somewhat remarkable accomplishment, as even British people would look at my mother's tea consumption and suggest that perhaps she' ( Read more... )

Somehow the last  two posts ended up being a brief history of growing up Jewish in North Dakota, so I thought I'd continue with the last explicitly Jewish food currently in my backlog, matzo ball soup ( Read more... )

Although we may not have kept kosher, my family did go to synagogue and observe a number of Jewish rituals in our house when I was growing up. In particular, on Friday nights we nearly always did kiddush over the wine followed by hamotzi over the bread, with the lighting of the Sabbath candles later. The wine was usually something red, in a small ( Read more... )

First: My parents have added commentary to the taco postMy family did not keep kosher when I was growing up. Since my father's family also had not kept kosher when he was growing up, this isn't greatly surprising, but even if we had been so inclined there were so few Jews in North Dakota that any kosher meat had to come from the Twin Cities five ( Read more... )

If pizza was my favorite food as a kid and spaghetti and meatballs was number two, number three was probably tacos.

As it happens, M loves tacos, and we make many different varieties of them for dinner. In 2020 we've already made two  new variations of tacos and countless more last year. Heck, we had tacos for a big lunch today. However, growing ( Read more... )

Last week, I mentioned that pizza was probably my favorite meal for most of my childhood. I'm not going to pretend that I have a ranked list of everything my mother made when I was growing up (ok, a lot of you probably wouldn't be surprised if I did), but I do have a reasonably good idea of what my top three are. Number two was spaghetti & ( Read more... )

My family growing up was somewhat unusual in that we had homemade pizza for dinner more often than restaurant pizza. Part of this was simple geography. There was only one takeout pizza place in our exact hometown, and it only offered pizza for a few years of my childhood. I should know, I worked there, and frankly that pizza was just ok anyway. ( Read more... )

Today is Father's Day. I have a pretty fantastic Dad, but he didn't cook at all. This was largely because Mom preferred to do the cooking, not because Dad wasn't capable. On those few occasions when Dad was the cook, we ate well. We certainly didn't resort to take out or microwave dinners like they show in sitcoms with incompetent fathers ( Read more... )

Before I dig into the entry for this week, it's worth mentioning that while my sister and I have occasionally texted back and forth on the details of these posts, I write them alone. Everyone else sees them after they go up. My parents have occasionally sent along feedback, which I add after the fact as an edit. Sometimes that provides clarifying ( Read more... )

If you've read the first six posts in this series, you would be excused for thinking that I loved every single thing that my mother made when I was growing up. While I was not a particularly picky eater, especially compared to my sister, there were definitely a few things my mother made that I was not a fan of. Unfortunately, she made them over and ( Read more... )