Why my family is weird: Part 2

I know that you've all been eagerly awaiting the second chapter of this feature to learn more about why my family is weird (in the most positive way possible, I keep reminding my mom...) This part will focus on food.

I got thinking about this picture last night, at a potsticker party hosted by Erin and Reid. While folding potstickers/wontons and discussing the potstickers pooping out fillings and potstickers being generally goopy, I remembered making wontons as a child. My strongest memory was making wontons on Christmas day in 1994. That year Christmas fell on a Sunday and so instead of a Christmas turkey dinner, we headed to church and came back to snacks and food we didn't get the rest of the year. The next day we had our traditional Christmas dinner. Christmas day we got wontons, chips, onion soup dip, and other goodies that didn't resonate as strongly. That year my cousin had been studying in China and her dad, while visiting her, had also picked up a "Mao suit" for my mom, which mom wore while frying the wontons with chopsticks.

There was a brief period of time in which I could wear the same clothes as my mom...so I dressed up in the Mao suit for Girl Scout Thinking Day. I also made a poster on China and Chinese currency and made fortune cookies from scratch, I think. This was probably early 1995.

In middle school, my "go to" after school snack in the fall was a chopped up zucchini sauteed until golden brown with italian breadcrumbs and cheddar cheese sprinkled on top. I both invented and cooked this snack. It was based on one of my favorite treats, deep fried breaded zucchini slices. Luckily my version was much faster and involved less flying oil.

In elementary school I was the envy of my classmates because I made my own classmates and picked what went in my lunchbox. (In first grade it was a fashionable Minnie Mouse lunchbox, if you were wondering...) For a while I brought cold hot dogs every day. My other gold standard was cream cheese and jam. I was really anti-PB&J. This made me a rebel in the eyes of the other kids. I'll also note that this did not last long...

My parents tried to raise us to be aware of other people outside our social setting and this involved a number of things. As Alaskans, we got a check from the government (Permanent Fund Dividend) for $800-$1800 a year. Most of the check went to fund visits to our relatives and deposits to our college funds. But first we got to pick where 10% (our tithe) would go. Anthony and I almost always donated our money to Heifer Project International, an organization that aims to end poverty and hunger by distributing animals around the world and having the recipient families distribute the next generation of chickens or cows to other families in the community. So, based on this, it wasn't surprising that my parents were frustrated by the food consumption and waste in our house. So every once in a while they'd institute a "rice week." This was a week where we'd have rice 3 meals a day, for seven days. The rules were fairly simple. For breakfast and lunch you could add butter or milk and sugar. For dinner there'd be a simple vegetable stirfry, sometimes with a small amount of meat. The idea was to remind us that we were fairly well off and that if I had to eat a PB&J sandwich for lunch some day that would not be the end of the world. Neither was oatmeal the end of the world. Or not having a drumstick/thigh per person for dinner. Or a different starch for every meal. I didn't like the rice breakfast cereal plan, so for rice week, I had rice with butter for two meals a day. It was interesting...in that it wasn't. (Oh, and we're not talking wild rice or brown rice here. Just plain medium grain white rice.) We never had rice week during the school year. In part because cold rice isn't appealing for school lunch and in part because there might have had to be some explaining to our teachers.

Today I was discussing this with my parents and my mom was remembering rice week differently. She remembered it as coming after a time of indulgence, such as Thanksgiving. Dad suggested we do rice week starting on November 27. (I'm home from Nov 24-Nov 30) I think I politely declined...while I think it's a great idea and might try to do it again sometime, while I'm at home with full access to my dad's cooking is NOT the time to start!

There may or may not be a Part 3 of this series, depending whether or not I can think of more things to add to the list. If you have ideas to add (remember, this is the positive side of weird!) please comment on this post or email me. Or you can share why your family is weird. Really, I just like comments :) But not the spam sort, so if you're trying to sell me a rolex watch or help me make $5000 dollars a week FROM HOME, you don't need to comment. But all other commenters are good.