Scrump

The hardest thing about being vegetarian is never being able to return to the food I loved as a kid. But on the rare occasion that I witness someone eating breaded whitefish cooked in too much butter, it displaces me. In a good way.

My mom makes this scalloped corn that has never been recreated outside of her kitchen. I sometimes think of it like an old friend woh I haven't seen in a while and who I miss terribly. Then again everything my mom cooks is wonderful.

You know, this one is tough for me-- it's hard to say what makes a food remind me of home when I've come to dislike a lot of those childhood favorites, both in taste and on principle; yet certain foods, of course, still make me feel comforted and nostalgic.
Rather than try to pinpoint what makes a newly beloved food recall memories, I'm aiming to be true to my roots here, and go with a food that I loved at home as a child and still love now.

Mayonnaise, as everyone knows, will always have a prominent place in my heart.

Turkey sandwiches with mayonnaise, and two classic southern mayo-based salads, tuna and potato, consistently and strongly remind me of home. Those salads have to be made by the Grainer mom, though. Because no one else's tastes the same. And I am not trying to be trite; I am dead serious.

Oh! And chips & salsa. Always and forever.

I guess some Jew foods remind me of home, like homemade matzoh ball soup and chopped liver. Also, my mom used to make cornflake chicken with cooked baby carrots all the time, and I made it the other day. Just seeing it and smelling it on the plate immediately reminded me of home.

Anna, chips and salsa. That's a good one. Eating chips and salsa reminds me of only good things, such as living room floors, Nena, family, parties and midnight snacks. Also, you're right about Mom's potato salad. It looks like regular potato salads, but other potato salads that look like that taste like puke and hers tastes great. I don't know how she un-pukes it.

Molly, please make me some matzoh ball soup. That's all.

Raquel even agrees about the potato salad!
Do you remember Mom always made that huge batch in the glass mixing bowl with red measurements on the side? Raquel would come over after school and she and Aimee and I would just have at that bowl of potato salad.
We actually talked about its awesomeness recently, with fond reminiscences about how it is the greatest and how we used to eat it as a dip with potato chips.

Tamalehawk has been chasing the egg sandwich of his youth ever since he moved away from New York. It's nothing complicated, just a fried egg with a criss-cross of bacon on a soft and crunchy roll. He didn't realize that they didn't make rolls everywhere in the world, and certainly not the cornmeal dusted and poppy seed-topped kind he's looking for. Though this quest hasn't stopped him from devouring egg sandwiches like they're about to be banned, he still holds this original template in a special place in his fragile bird heart.

Also, he offers a hearty high five to anyone dipping potato chips into potato salad, and suggests putting it all on top of your burger and then feeling a sort of embarrassed shame for anyone else at the picnic who isn't doing the same.

Scrambled eggs. Every time I go home we make scrambled eggs at least once. Now I realize that this is probably true for everyone, but I think about my mom's kitchen every time I eat scrambled eggs. And anything grilled, on a real grill. My family used the grill in the backyard a lot growing up. And meatloaf. My mom used to make meatloaf like once a week. I don't eat meatloaf anymore.

I love this question because it not only asks for a food but also a notion of home. What is home...? I suddenly sort of feel like Zach Braff in that one movie where he and Natalie Portman listen to the Shins and talk about how New Jersey isn't hip enough for people who wear cardigans and have existential crises. Which is not how I want to feel. I want to talk about food.

I have three ideas of home: Seattle at large, my mom's house, and Chicago.
1. Seattle--Salmon is a comfort food that completely nourishes my soul and heart and gives me a sense of stability and familiarity even when far away from home. In Seattle, salmon is ubiquitous--even at crappy cheap diners they will serve salmon burgers or "salmon dinners" which are frightening and wonderful.

2. Mom's House--Growing up, I ate a lot of once-frozen food. My mom worked late and I started making my own dinners when I was fairly young, which meant anything from Spaghetti-O's to homemade stew. In 8th grade I started getting into hippie feed and natural sodas, so I'd make my mom buy me these weird wheat-germ frozen lasagna things from our local co-op. Back then, no one ate organic foods except women who worshipped rainbows and didn't shave their armpits, and me apparently, so the options were limited and extremely expensive. Now, there are so many excellent frozen organic options at Whole Foods and beyond, but I still love these crazy wheat-germ lasagna things. The "ricotta" is made from soy, I think, and the "cheese" is probably made from a substance found on the moon. They are objectively terrible, but so strangely appealing to me. I would not recommend these dinners to anybody, but they remind me of home and I still buy them all the time for that reason. Nostalgia, man. It's powerful stuff.

3. Chicago--I've spent most of my 5.5 years in Chicago living in the wacky Albany Park neighborhood, a place that very few people know exist and even fewer care to visit. There are really only five reasons why you would ever visit this last stop on the Brown Line: Holy Land Sweets, Jaafer Sweets, Nazareth Sweets, Al-Khaymeh Bakery, and Dawali Bakery. All five offer incomparable selections of my favorite dessert, baklava. Greek and Turkish baklava tends to be sloppy, overly-sweet, big, chunky, ugh disgusting. But at these Jordanian and Palestinian bakeries, baklava is small, subtle, complicated, bite-sized, nutty, carefully-crafted, beautiful. I used to buy pounds of this stuff and eat it over extended periods of time, especially during the winter. When I'm away from Seattle I miss good Asian food and seafood, but when I'm away from Chicago I would willingly partake in a series of crimes just for a piece of walnut or cashew baklava from Jaafer Sweets.

mari-

i'm a huge fan of albany park's sweets!

Coffee ice cream with grandma, in the little dining room, and peppermints.

homemade oatmeal bread. breakfast burritos. anything combining pace picante sauce and sour cream. homemade soup with homemade noodles. chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. a breakfast sandwich featuring a toasted english muffin, cream cheese, and a freshly nuked egg. salted butter. also, any time i have a shame-worthy realization that i've just woken from your classic run of the mill binge hour.

popcorn with lawry's seasoning salt and cayenne pepper. my dad has this sick ass popcorn pot that he never washes. he just swipes it out with a paper towel. It's black on the bottom. he holds the lid over the pot instead of letting it sit to let the moisture out while the corn is popping.

the food that reminds me most of home is barbecue sausage. for my birthday a couple years ago my gf had sausage mailed to me from kreuz market, my favorite barbecue place in texas. i've never had sausage delivered to me before, and it was fantastic. i ate it all quickly, and was very satisfied. it definitely makes me think of home.

egg sandwiches always remind me of my dad. while he has added a few more meals to his repertoire since i was a child, when i was little and my mom was gone for dinner, my brother and sisters and i could always count on egg sandwiches: 2 over easy eggs on toasted wheat bread with mustard. at first i didn't even like them but i ate them just to make my dad happy, and eventually i grew to love them. i have this memory of my dad and i, alone for dinner for maybe the only time in my young life, eating egg sandwiches in the dark kitchen, so quietly i could hear him chewing each bite.
now i will eat any egg sandwich i can get my hands on.
(first post. phew.)