Leftovers
Posted on December 14, 2013 under Storytelling with no comments yet
Is there anything better than two day old stew? Or how about spaghetti sauce after twelve hours in the slow cooker and three or four days in the fridge. One of life’s small pleasures consists of enjoying really good food for a second time. Yes, food that has been “aged” seems to taste better but, from my perch, it has as much to do with the fact that you get a day off of cooking. We all know how wonderful a meal tastes when you’re not the one preparing it.
While eating leftovers is hardly new, you don’t hear much about it anymore. This may have something to do with the preponderance of prepared, ready to eat food and a culture of eating fast foods. We are a generation on the move and restaurant meals and “take out” have become more the norm. A doggy bag with an unfinished meal is sometimes as close as we get to eating leftovers.
It wasn’t always this way.
These days you hear a lot about “food security.” A household is considered “food secure” when its occupants do not live in hunger or fear starvation. Growing up in a family of ten, food security had a very different meaning.
When we were younger, we lived very close to the schools. In those days you went home for lunch and the noontime meal was actually the main meal for many families.
When we got up on a weekday morning, our mother would have been on the go since the crack of dawn, with several loads of laundry underway, the ringer washer sitting in the middle of the living room. Besides getting eight of us ready for school, she would have the bread dough rising on the counter and preparations for the day’s dessert well under way. Grand Central station was never quite this busy.
And then at precisely noon, the vultures would arrive home and decimate the food that she had spent much of the morning preparing. Leftovers. Are you kidding me? Food security meant taking your place at the trough and never taking your eye off your plate lest someone else make off with a scrap.
Dessert was generally an all-out war. We hadn’t heard the warnings about consuming massive doses of sugar. We weren’t gluten intolerant and, because we spent most of our waking hours running, climbing trees and playing street hockey, we didn’t worry about childhood obesity.
It’s not easy to cut two pies into 10 uniform pieces, and many a squabble erupted when someone felt that their piece might have been a quarter of an inch smaller than the others … our first experience with the notion of justice. Everyone ate dessert. No exceptions. The only time that there was a leftover piece of dessert was when someone was out of town or sick in bed. There would be no other rational explanation.
On those rare occasions when there was one extra serving, the lottery system was invoked. And you think getting chosen for a moose license is tough. One of my brothers always seemed to be the arbiter of the debates over who would get the last piece, a precursor to his future calling in life. When one of us was absent and the last piece of dessert was to be meted out, he would ask us all to pick a number from one to ten. Shockingly, none of us ever guessed right. He always chose the last number and, wonder of wonders, his was consistently the winner.
As incomprehensible as it seems, once in a blue moon there would be a couple of left over cookies or cake. The first one out of bed in the morning would make short work of those. Pretty well explains why, to this day, all of my siblings are such early risers.
These days, our kids have flown and it is not uncommon for my wife and me to eat the same thing for three or four days in a row. Waste not; want not, as it were.
And we don’t fight over dessert. She can’t tolerate gluten and I don’t eat sweets any more. There’s probably still a bit of sugar left in my system anyway.
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