foundations of a foodie?

a big part of my relationship with my father revolved around food. mcdonald's on sunday mornings before church or on road trips. countless trips to ponderosa or sizzler or shoney's or shakey's. feeling grown up the first time i ordered chopped steak because daddy was nice enough to wait until later to burst my bubble. :-) 

are you hungry? let's eat. not hungry? let me know when you are and we'll get you something to eat. i don't remember the first time i joined my father in the kitchen during meal prep. it wasn't a big deal for me to see him cooking (and cleaning, at least until i was old enough to take on kitchen duty) and then we'd sit down to eat. i don't remember being a picky eater so much as i was really clear on what i liked and what i didn't and i had the space to express that (within polite boundaries, of course).

like chitlins. family lore has it that someone gave me a forkful of chitlins when i was 6 or so, and i promptly threw up all over james. i haven't touched them since and no one in my immediate family would even consider offering them to me unless they had a memory lapse of some sort.

daddy would never force me to try new things or eat something i didn't like just because it was there. like spicy food. i told the popeye's in kokomo story on here a couple of years ago and it's still one of my strongest memories.

tamales are another strong memory for me. daddy became obsessed with making tamales, to the point that on every trip to mississippi, he'd ask around for so-and-so's recipe and how did such-and-such make their tamales and, of course, have a few samples. he'd come home, add his findings to whatever he'd already collected, and tinker with the recipe. next thing i knew, the kitchen table would be covered with masa and corn husks. i don't know when he'd decided that he'd mastered the recipe, but i do know he'd sell tamales to friends and family and made enough to cover his costs and a little extra. i also remember bringing a batch to school once for a class potluck or something like that. everyone went crazy over them, and deservedly so. those tamales were delicious. one of my regrets is not getting that recipe from daddy before he died.

as meat and potatoes as he was, i appreciated daddy's willingness to branch out (like with the tamales) without making it a big deal. i've said before that my smoked sausage and broccoli dish was one of the first things i made up on my own in high school. i'm not sure i would've done it if daddy had made a face or expressed disgust or displeasure. it was just, try it out and if you don't like it, that's ok. if it doesn't work, let's try to figure out what went wrong. if you've read my recipe reviews, then you've seen a little bit of that in action.

i think that's one helluva lesson to take away, not just for food, but for life in general. try it out and if you don't like it, it's ok. if it doesn't work, try to figure out why and go from there.