Life through Food

I don’t remember a lot of the foods that I enjoyed as a young child, but I have always been a very picky eater and enjoyed the basics the most; pizza, hot dogs, and hamburgers. My parents struggled financially when I was younger so we were unable to go out to eat a whole lot. The grade school days aren’t much clearer but I do remember that the school lunch came sometimes with a peanut butter sandwich with honey mixed in with the peanut butter that made it easier to eat. The way the honey made the peanut butter sandwich tingle on the tongue made it all that I had to eat for lunch to fill satisfied. Middle school gave birth to the walking taco, the little bag of Fritos chips filled with lettuce, sour cream, and cheese made the public school’s mystery meat taste like grade A beef fit for private school children. High school had more options but with the greater number of choices came lower quality of the food. Freshmen year had the best food and I don’t know if it was the fact that I had grown used to the food or budget cuts had forced the school to buy cheaper food, but as I progressed through the years the food got worse and worse. The new a la carte line had the best breadsticks that came with a nacho cheese dip, and I lived on that alone for the first couple of years. As the years went on the cheese sauce suffered with smaller serving sizes and instead of just the cheese they started to add bits of peppers which made the sauce almost inedible. High school also had two types of chicken sandwich, hot and just plain chicken, patties. They never really changed in how they were made but they became almost too expensive to buy.
When I turned fourteen I wanted to learn how to cook some of the meals that I loved growing up. So my father showed me how to make hamburgers and macaroni and cheese for the family. The first time I ever tried I left the macaroni on the stove after I added the cheese and the cheese burnt a little and the hamburgers were sort of undercooked, the whole meal was ruined. As with anything, if you work at it you will get better and that is what happened, the next chance that I got I made sure to pay more attention to the macaroni and my father help me learn how to tell when the hamburgers were completely cooked. I’m not done learning the staple meals of my childhood, I still have to learn how to cook the perfect meatloaf my father has been making for as long as I can remember.