Tostadas! Tostadas!

This past Sunday evening, as I sat on the sofa letting my mind wander during a commercial break of Kiss the Girls on Oxygen, I thought about the following day, Valentine's Day.  My thoughts didn't linger long there, as the holiday has no meaning for me at this footloose and fancy free stage in my life.  However, because the week ahead was already on my mind, I thought further to Tuesday and the date, February 15, and then I thought no more of it, for a nanosecond.  But even that nanosecond made me feel like I forgot something very important, and the forgetting, however fleeting, stung.  February 15, 1995, was the day my mom passed away, at age 43.  Sixteen years is a long time, but it should never be long enough to forget. 

The loss of a parent is supremely personal.  Even among siblings, the experience is different.  My relationship with my mom was not the same relationship she had with my sisters and my brother.  As a result, a lot of our memories of her are unique, and ours alone.  So I won't talk about those.  I will discuss, however, a specific impression I have of my mother, one that my siblings share.  That was dinnertime.

I wouldn't say that my mom was a culinary genius.  I doubt as children we would have even liked haute cuisine.  (As an adult, my appreciation for food has remained comfortably simple.)  She did, however, take the time to make dinner, and I would venture to say that she sometimes made dinner interesting.  The title of this post refers to taco night, when she set up an assembly line of ground beef, lettuce, cheese, and taco shells.  Did she announce dinner with phrases like the succinct, "Dinner!"?  "Soup's on!"?  "Get it while it's hot!"?  No.  She sang out, "Tostadas!  Tostadas!  Do-do-dodo-do-do."  And there might have been a jig involved.  Who can resist loading up their plate with that ditty in her head?

Other family favorites included Spanish rice and baked hot dogs topped with mashed potatoes and cheese.  Suddenly I'm craving potato soup with ham cubes.  What I won't crave, however, were some of the duds, because no matter how much I love her and miss her, there were some fails.  I remember a chicken and rice casserole that in retrospect had ingredients that I love today, like broccoli and Parmesan cheese (and water chestnuts, which I can live without), but I always associated it with the small of vomit, and many times she dumped it days later after it sat in the fridge, spraying Lysol over the stench, so then it was Lysol-enhanced vomit.  I can't smell that original Lysol scent today without shuddering.

Looking back, it seems like it was the same rotation of meals for years, but I don't recall ever being bored with what was on my plate, and it is the single most clear memory I have of her.  A lot of the meals are common, easily replicated with a quick browse of recipe sites, a device my younger sister and I used last year when we recreated some those food memories.  One was tuna casserole, cobbled together with crescent rolls.  I hadn't had it for years (I did go through a phase about a year ago of making the hot dog/mashed potatoes).  One bite of it and I could envision my mom pulling the cookie sheet out of the oven, with me standing beside her in that small galley kitchen, anxious for the first cut. 

It's a good memory.

And now I'm hungry.