Jeffrey Aycock
Fightin foods
Food Narrative
Essay 1
My mom and my grandma love to cook, which I love. Who does not like a home cooked meal. It does not matter what they cook it is always the best food you will ever put in your mouth. I don’t think there has ever been one single time that we have had guest over and them not to like what they cook.
Although everything at my house is very good there is still nothing in this world that is perfect. There are two meals that are controversial in our family. That is not just our immediate family either. These controversial meals deals with my immediate family along with my mom side of the family. There are only two meals that cause problems. The two meals are spaghetti and meatballs and shrimp. We usually only cook those two certain meals two times a year. The reason for this is because those two meals take a lot of work and a lot of preparation to fix them, but they are everyone’s favorite meals.
The two times that we or better yet my mom and grandma cook the two meals are at Christmas and for the fourth of July. The reason why we pick those two dates is because of two reasons. One is because those are the only two times out of the year that the whole family is together in one house. The second reason is because there is no other meal that everyone in the family likes as a whole. So when we do cook those meals everyone eats it.
The preparation for the spaghetti and meatballs begin about six months before it is served for the whole family. This does not have to be done in this fashion but my grandma has discovered it is the easiest way to do it. She does this by cooking it for my immediate family, instead of just cooking enough for six people she cooks enough for fifteen or twenty people. She does this so that after we are done with that particular meal she will freeze the extra meatballs for Christmas or the Fourth of July. So when one of those two dates come up she already has the meal half way prepared and does not have to work has hard.
You are asking yourself where the controversial part of this meal comes into play. Well here you go. The first year that my grandma and mom fixed this meal for the whole family we did not have enough meatballs. When that happened, not really out of anger just kind of joking around, everyone question everyone about how many meatballs everyone has actually had. Of course no one told anyone the actually number of meatballs he or she really had eaten. So from that point on every time we had meatballs everyone had to start out only getting two meatballs for the first serving. Then after the first serving you could only get one at a time until everyone had enough. Then when most everyone was finish then meatballs were fair game and you can take as many as you want.
The shrimp on the other had does not have to be prepared that far in advanced. The shrimp is the most unique meal that is cooked in my house. I say this because not just one or two people help fix the meal. Everyone in the house, at least everyone that is going to eat that meal, has to help prepare the meal. That is why I think it is so unique. The day before we make the meal we buy seven to eight pounds of shrimp. You think that is a lot of shrimp but you have to remember that we are feeding any were from twenty to thirty people. So after we buy all the shrimp everyone in the house how to take shifts and pill the shrimp. If you do not pill a single shrimp then you do not get to eat the shrimp the next day.
It has been a couple years ago that my family and I have started this tradition. Now it is just fun to pick on people if they do not follow our rules that we have set from the years past. Like for instants if someone had to work on the day everyone pilled the shrimp we would try to make them feel bad for eaten it and not helping make it. Or if someone would grab three meatballs for there first serving we would make them put it back. It is really just fun and games and a very unique way that me and my family bond together.