Food Memories--Good and Not So Good

This little poster made me think about the foods we ate in our growing-up years. For those of you assembling a Family Memories book, this is a hot topic. Who doesn't like to eat? You can even write a personal essay about food for a memoir magazine or ezine.

Think back to your early days and the special foods your mom, or dad, fixed on a regular basis. A lot of kids  grew up eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. Another popular lunch that brings back happy moments was tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. I'm betting that most often, that soup came right out of a can with a Campbell's label on it. How about the macaroni and cheese that came out of the blue Kraft box? What special made-from-scratch recipes did your family have?

Maybe your mom wasn't a very good cook. You can write about that, too. Might have a lot of humorous tales to tell if that's the case. Or maybe mom was a very good cook who had occasional disasters. We've all had a few of those over the years.

Include the holiday dinners your family had. We tend to be traditionalists, so our holiday meals often feature the same foods every year. Whether Christmas, Passover, Easter, or Thanksgiving, it's an easy menu for moms to plan. I do vary the Christmas dinner menu a little but Thanksgiivng is always the same. Any changes and my family gets upset. One year, I didn't make the Green Bean Casserole and my son nearly cried. Never made that mistake again.

Here are a few memory triggers to help you write about foods in your family, then and now:

1. What foods did you have in different seasons of the year?

2.  What was your mom's (or your own) specialty?

3.  What was your family's favorite cookie recipe?

4.  What cold winter morning item did you eat most often?

5.  What holiday foods were traditional in yoru family?

6.  Who did the cooking in your family?

7.  Where did you have holiday dinners? At home? At Grandma;s?

8.  What is your comfort food today and why?

9.  Did your family have a garden?

10. Did your family have to pinch pennies at the grocery store?

11. Was yours a family that lived to eat or ate to live?