Food Essay

Brianne Butler
bmbutler@mail.usi.edu
English 201.010
Essay 2 Draft
Word Count: 1162

Dinner Time Isn’t Only for Eating
Passing around the dinner rolls, scooping pasta out of the pot, and serving apple sauce is quite common at The Butler household. Pasta is an entrée that my family commonly eats. Dinner time at my house is a time not only to consume food but also for communication about our days. At some point during our conversation someone will say something hysterical. There is rarely a meal at my house that goes without laughter.
Since I was young, we always had pasta at least one a week. The type of pasta would vary week to week. Most common, we had manicotti . The manicotti that my mother makes is one of the best I have ever had. Creamettes manicotti noodles, original Prego, tomato paste, and ground round. Yes, those are typical ingredients for manicotti, but for some reasons my mother’s has always tasted better. I believe it is made with love and no one else can re-create that. When I began the teenage years, my mother decided that it would be wise if she began to teach me how to cook. She always thought that during the winter months she would get snowed in at work, across the state line in Missouri, and the rest of the family would not have any food made to eat; since my father cannot cook. She figured that since I absolutely love pasta that she would start small and teach me how to cook manicotti.
One Saturday afternoon in autumn, my mother said to me, “Brianne, I am going to teach you how to cook manicotti this evening.” I was on Cloud 9 when she informed that I would be cooking dinner. At about four thirty, we began my first cooking lesson. I thought that it was a lot harder than she made it seem. I had problems with boiling the water, I was impatient and I could not wait. There was too much going on at once; waiting for the water to boil, preheating the over, preparing the meat, and starting the sauce. At first, I was overwhelmed and was about to give up. I decided that my mother wanted to teach me for a reason and I stuck with it. She told me that a good cook will do things in a certain order and she taught me how she prepared one of my favorite meals.
After we got a majority of the meal started, we started adding spices to the sauce. Parsley flakes, minced onion, minced garlic, and garlic salt are the ingredients there is no set amount that we put in; we just stop when it smells good. After the noodles were cooked, we put them in a cold water bath so we would be able to stuff them. We began to roll the meat in a cylinder shape so it would fit in the noodle; we would then put the stuffed noodles in the pan. Once all fourteen noodles were stuffed we poured our homemade sauce on them. The final step before putting the meal in the oven was to put parmesan cheese, Swiss cheese, and mozzarella cheese on the top of sauce. The final step of the meal before consumption was to put it in the over for an hour at 350 degrees. After completing all of the steps to making manicotti, my mother said, “You did a really good job and I am proud of you.”
During the time I was learning to prepare this delicious meal, the sauce ended up all over me. Who knew that during cooking more food could end up on you than for the meal? After waiting for the timer to buzz felt like an eternity when in reality, it was only sixty minutes. The timer buzzed. I was excited to see the end product. Excellent, would be the word to describe the meal. I eagerly called the rest of my family for dinner. As I served dinner, my family was impressed that I had made this meal. It tasted delicious. I received so many complements about my cooking. Since my family enjoyed my cooking it made me what to be able to cook everything just like my mother did. My mother began allowing me to cook more and more things. I was glad to take on the responsibility of cooking.
As long as I can remember, every meal there will be an outburst of laughter; at least one time a week, my mother will end up crying at the table due to laughter. To me, food not only reminds me of time to eat but a time of laughter and jubilation. Meal time does not only mean food, it usually entails me hysterically laughing as well. There is never a dull conversation when my family and I eat. Someone will say something completely out of order or something that happened to them during the day or even the occasional impersonation of a co-worker from my dad. Before I left for college, I made my mother cry from laughter. We were recalling stories from the past and the one came up about me falling out of the high chair when I was a few months old. This was a shocker to me I never knew that I fell when I was a baby. Without thinking about the proper way to phrase what I wanted to say, I immediately said, “Did you think you hurt her?” By the time the words were out of my mouth, my brother, mother, and father were all laughing hysterically. It takes a lot to make my father laugh, but I sure did. I did not realize what was so funny until about thirty minutes later when someone finally calmed down and was able to tell me what was so funny. Whenever we see our mother in tears from laughing we know someone said something ridiculously funny. Usually the culprit is me.
Since I have been away from my house for meal time, I feel as if I am missing out on a part of my family’s life and since I do not have a kitchen in my room on campus, I make it up at The Loft most days. Maybe I have luck that makes everything that happens to me seem funny or maybe I am a funny person in general. My family will call me if something made everyone laugh at the dinner table and tell me all about it. Laughter burns calories and on some occasions I feel as if at dinner time my family burns more calories than they consumed.
Dinner time to me is not only a time to eat but a time for conversation as well. I fell as if talking during meal time bring people closer together and more connected. Food brings people together for more than one thing. Meal time is something that I look forward to daily, not for the food but for the conversations that will arise from the meal.