Good Food on the Table

A snapshot from the New Year’s feast at my cousins’ house when I was 4. My dad is in the middle smiling with me sitting on his lap.

My dad must be getting to the stage where he looks back and wonders if he has done the right thing or made the right choices in life. Once in a while, he voices his subtle concerns about the seemingly small but important choices he made for me and my brother. Over a dinner my mom and I prepared when we visited last November, he asked us whether he did enough to teach us the importance of good food.

“I wonder if I did enough to teach you how important good meals are,” my dad said with a glass of beer in his hand.

“Dad, you don’t have to worry about that. You provided the means, and mom fed us good meals,” I said. “Look how picky we are about what we eat!”

Dad didn’t have much to do with what we ate at home when I was growing up, but my mom was a good cook who taught us the basics. Thanks to my maternal grandma, who raised her children on good home-cooked meals, my mom always tried to do the same for us.

My dad has told me many times that he grew up on just about the same 10 simple items his mother prepared. For example, one meal he often ate was miso soup with stir-fried dried sardines and an omelet. “Now when I look back, I think that your grandma, being a bad cook, probably caused your grandpa to be irritable all the time,” Dad said. “Your aunt and I didn’t know that meals could be something to look forward to, but your grandpa knew.”

I also knew as a child that my paternal grandmother wasn’t a good cook and that her 10 simple items didn’t taste so great. When my brother and I stayed over on weekends, we had more than our fair share of those 10 dishes, but we really didn’t mind because she also bought soft bread with unnaturally colored cream for breakfast and almost always ordered out from nearby Japanese and Chinese restaurants for dinner. My brother and I thought of the weekends as special occasions when we were able to eat things we didn’t get at home.

“That makes me feel good.” My dad seemed to have expected to hear that and smiled. “I devoted all I had to my work, so your mom handled the meals. I had no doubt about her skills because the first thing that surprised me after we married was the taste and the variety of the food your mom prepared. I thought, ‘This is what I am going to eat for the rest of my life? Marriage is great!’”