My dearest friends brighten my week by joining me for dinner at El Rodeo every Wednesday. I have gotten the same thing every week for more than a third of a century: nachos mara, chicken and beans but no beef, no sour cream, extra lettuce, add guacamole. Reeently, the wonderful staff has begun referring to it as "The Cliff." The affection behind such a gesture always makes me smile. When I go to the restaurant on other days (and sometimes I eat there three or more times a week), I order something different, because "The Cliff" isn't just a great dish, it's a dish whose most important ingredient is the love and friendship that makes that meal the highlight of my week.
Susan had her first pizza ever on a Saturday date with me back in 1970. She loved it. From that week on, we had pizza for Saturday dinner almost every week of our lives. Village Inn, Pizza Inn, Petro's, Pizza Hut, Pasquale's, Mellow Mushroom, Everybody's, Rosa's, Bellacino's, La Bella's, Capozzi's, Domino's, Jet's, Star, Night Owl, DaVinci's, Peace Love & Pizza, Santino's, G'Angelo's... lots of pizza places over the years. Some great, some good, some mediocre, some pretty crummy. Didn't matter, though. I was having pizza with Susan, just like we did every Saturday, and if it was great, we relished it. If it was bad, we started talking about where we were going to get pizza the next Saturday.
My mom made the best Irish stew ever. Some friends who are sticklers for detail correct me, saying that the ingredients Mom added weren't in classic Irish stew. I didn't care. They were in my mom's Irish stew, so there were in my Irish stew. Mom shared the recipe with Kim and me when each of us got married, and every time either of us made it, we didn't call it Irish stew--we called it Mom's Irish stew. The day before Mom went into the hospital for the final time in her losing struggle with emphysema, she sat in the kitchen and watched Dad make Irish stew for everyone. When it was ready, she took a bite, then smiled. It was Mom's Irish Stew.
Dad loved to grill barbecued chicken. There's an art to it. Get the grill too hot, let it sit on one side too long, and the sugars in the barbecue sauce blacken and carbonize and the barbecue chicken becomes bitter and crunchy. Cook it at the right temperature, the barbecue sauce darkens and crisps ever so slightly at the thinnest part of the chicken. Dad got it right every time. I never learned that art, but I wish I had.
Mom and Susan both made spaghetti and meat sauce. Each recipe was very different. Mom's was the recipe she had learned from her mother, modifying it to suit Dad's tastes. It was the recipe I grew up with--slightly sweeter, bigger bits of green peppers and onions cooked until totally soft. Susan's was made the way her family made it when she was a child--a more robust tomato tang, smaller pieces of onion and green pepper and red pepper, sautéed to the point where there was still a bit of crispness, with thinly sliced mushrooms mixed in. I loved them both, but never thought of them as the same food, name notwithstanding.
Susan loved sweets for breakfast. Pop Tarts or muffins or cookies or cinnamon rolls or coffee cake--she loved them all, and would have them for every breakfast if she had her choice. I often joked that I could eat cereal for breakfast almost every day and I would be perfectly happy, but I liked to eat breakfast with Susan, so I'd usually have what she was having.
Susan and I often remarked that we had plebeian tastes. We routinely enjoyed the most mundane foods. Mrs. Gorton's frozen flounder and haddock filets. Stouffer's meat lover's lasagna. Two sandwiches, one made from Boar's Head sweet sliced ham (which, contrary to the name, is not sweet) and the other from mesquite turkey. Tuna salad with just enough mayonnaise to stop it from being dry, but not enough to make it goopy, with dill pickle relish. Chicken salad, made the same way but with sweet pickle relish. Progresso soup--hearty tomato for me, chicken noodle for her. Marie Callendar's chicken pot pies, to which we would add a can of sweet peas with mushrooms. Mrs. Fearnow's Brunswick stew. Chicken tenders from Publix or from Zaxby's. We looked forward to these again and again.
When Susan died, I couldn't eat a lot of these foods. Even those I did eat, I had to change. Zaxby's chicken tenders were the last meal that Susan requested. I can't go back to Zaxby's. For the last few weeks of her life, I'd go to Wendy's and get a small chocolate and a small vanilla frosty every night at 9:45 and we'd alternate taking spoonfuls of it; I can still see her smile that accompanied every bite. I can't go back there now. I still eat pizza, but never on a Saturday. I make sandwiches, but only one, and I add a cheese that I liked but Susan didn't care as much for. If I have both turkey and ham, then I just eat the meat and the cheese, but no bread. I made tuna salad once; The memories were too much and I haven't tried it again. I hardly ever have anything sweet for breakfast, choosing cereal during the week and turkey sausage & Southwestern Egg Beaters with dry toast on weekends. Sometimes, I don't even eat a meal at home. When I have a big Wednesday dinner, or a great Friday lunch with my friends, that's usually my only meal of the day. Some of the changes are health focused. I'm getting a day older every morning, and metabolisms change with age. I work to stay ahead of that, so I eat to maintain my weight and my health.
But most of all, I eat different because I have to. I can't be sad with every meal. And if that means eating meals at different times, on different days, or even not eating some meals at all--well, I'm okay with that. We all find our own ways to survive. This is mine.
But tonight...
Didn't know what I wanted for dinner, so I looked in the freezer. Nothing appealed to me. So I went to the other freezer. Two Stouffer's meat lover's lasagnas were at the top of the stack, where they've been for over a year, when Susan and I bought them. She never got to have either of them before the fall and the stroke and every bad thing that followed.
And tonight, Stouffer's lasagna sounded good. So I had half a box--about 675 calories worth--with a small salad. The same thing Susan and I always had.
Good. Even better than I remembered. And I could remember how her eyes would squint when she took the first bite, followed by her saying, "This is so good." Every time. It made me smile.
Tonight I remembered. The lasagna, the squint, the remark. I remembered them all. And it made me smile.
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