October 9, 2005
a fond food memory
You are each responsible for identifying a food item that has some special significance to you. In order for it to be significant, it must be lodged into your memory, woven within your daily existence, or somehow attached to your emotions. Perhaps it is a food that was always prepared for a specific family holiday. It might be something you ate when you were young that you don’t even eat anymore. Or maybe it was a food you had only once, but its impact (positive or negative) stayed with you. It is important that the food has significance because your task will involve communicating that food’s special meaning in a way that others can grasp.
Uh. Uhhh. Wow, this assignment took me a long time to figure out. Strangely perhaps, this is the first paper (and a short one at that: 2 pages) I had to write this school year. I'll revise this later but if you're curious to read about a childhood food of mine, you're just a little too bored.
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Fried Egg Sandwich
“Hey Robyn, what do you have for lunch today?” asked the perky YMCA counselor. I opened my backpack, unearthing a lone plastic sandwich bag.
“Oh…would you like me to heat that up for you?”
The counselor took the sandwich out of the bag. While it had initially been warm when my mum fried the beaten eggs and pocketed the resulting white-streaked yellow congealed mass in between two slices of stiff, whole-grain bread, it lost its heat by the time I got to the YMCA for after-school care. I would usually eat my slightly soggy fried egg sandwiches in my classroom at room temperature where no heating implements were to be found, but since my elementary school had early dismissal that day, I ate my lunch at the microwave-blessed YMCA instead.
A few moments later I was presented with my nuked sandwich on a paper plate. Time to dig in.
There’s no mystery as to what my fried egg sandwich tasted like. Fried egg. Plain, un-toasted whole wheat bread. Combination of the two. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this kind of sandwich; it was fast, somewhat filling, and relatively healthy. Also, it was surely better than Lunchables, a sad excuse for a kid’s meal that I made the mistake of trying once—lured by its bright, colorful packaging—consisting of crackers, processed “cheese”, and meat products of questionable origins.
While I doubt I ever complained to my mother about the constant presence of fried egg sandwiches, instead demanding a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches accompanied by mini muffins and Capri Sun as many of my classmates appeared to have, I don’t think that fried egg sandwiches would rate highly on any child’s “scale of food desirability”. It’d be somewhere near the bottom, equivalent to Dante’s first circle of hell; it’s not that bad, but you certainly wouldn’t find angels noshing on it during afternoon tea in Heaven.
Eating the fried egg sandwich while sitting in the YMCA gave me two points from which I could lament my mother’s busy life. She didn’t have enough time to prepare something more involved than frying eggs and taking sliced bread out of a bag and she wasn’t home in the afternoon so that I could spend my time productively watching Disney cartoons in the living room instead of sitting under the glare of fluorescent lights alone at a table, staring at my sandwich as it lost its radiation-induced heat. There are worse things in life, but I wasn’t about to think of them at the age of 6.
I’m assuming that the fried egg sandwiches I ate so frequently as a child had something to do with my aversion to all versions of cooked eggs (except hard-boiled) for most of my life until just a year ago. If you want to recreate the fun that is my childhood school lunch, here’s what you need:
- One or two eggs, beaten
- Small amount of butter
- Two slices of whole wheat bread (must be whole wheat
In a frying pan, heat up the butter over medium heat until it melts and starts to sizzle. Add the beaten eggs to the pan, cooking until set and browned (kind of like an omelette). Remove eggs from pan and put between the slices of bread.
For more authenticity, wrap the sandwich in a clear fold top (not zipper) sandwich bag and eat it after the condensation from the heat has made the sandwich soggy and it reaches room temperature.
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Addendum: I love my mum to bits! But I don't have any super-fantastic memories related to her cooking.
Posted by roboppy at 7:22 PM
Comments (3)
That sounds oddly famaliar, except it was with hot dogs for me. But, my folks were too busy even to make lunch, so almost 100% of my lunches came from the school cafeteria.
Posted by: Wei-yang Wu at October 11, 2005 12:26 PM [#]
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hehe that story is GOLD! sounds like what i ate as a kid- egg sandwiches with mayo, altho i got alternate days of smooth peanut butter on slices of supermarket white bread...
Posted by: suze at October 11, 2005 3:19 AM [#]