Left-Overs

I had an interesting conversation with my favorite son-in-law recently concerning left-overs.  I said something about, how cooking just for myself, I often had left-overs.  Preparing one meal, for one person, I find difficult, especially if I make a soup or stew or casserole.  Even if I freeze a potion, I end up with the same meal several days in a row.  My motto is: eat to live, not live to eat; but it’s OK if it tastes good, and there’s nothing wrong with a little variety.

And let’s face it, soup always does tastes better the second day.  But you have to have some the first day, or you can’t tell the difference.  But I’m starting to digress, and my train of thought will leave the station with me standing on the platform looking confused.  It happens a lot.

Anyway, I was talking about left-overs, and how Blake and I have such different, yet rational, concepts of what left-overs  are.   Blake seems to look at it meal by meal.  You buy food for a meal, you eat all you want, anything left over is scrap, garbage.  Too bad, but that’s how it is.  And that would be OK, if those scraps could possibly be fed to pigs or something, but instead the garbage goes to the land-fill.

I come at the concept from a slightly different perspective.  When I was a little boy there were always the remnants of past suppers in the refrigerator, and on Fridays they were warmed up and served for supper, supplemented often by salmon patties.  Meatless Fridays used to be a Catholic thing.  It was observed in my grandparent’s house, and kept up, more or less, by habit after they died, even though no one any longer attended church.

And that wasn’t the only habit, or tradition, Grandpa Tony left me with.  Because of him, maybe a little bit at least, I came late to the concept of left-overs.  According to Grandpa Tony, wasting food was a sin.  There were no left-overs, only stuff you ate now and stuff you ate later.  If you didn’t eat it, if you wasted it, you sinned.  And I didn’t need any more sins.  Because, as my teachers at St. Helen School made abundantly clear, since my parents were divorced, I was half way to Hell already. 

I ate left-overs all my life, and I didn’t realize it.  I thought I was just ‘not wasting food,’ like Grandpa Tony told me.  But things did get shoved to the back of the fridge where they dried out or grew a fuzzy mold.  So when food went bad, it was still waste, but you didn’t have to eat it.  You could throw it out, if you felt a little guilty.

To be fair, Blake never said: if you don’t eat it, throw it out.  He only said: I don’t eat left-overs.  If someone else wants to, bon appétit!  And even though I know wasting food is a sin, because Grandpa Tony said so, I do waste food.  I try not to, but I do sometimes anyway.  Just as I suspect Blake would dine on left-overs if he was hungry enough. Blake is so typical of the people that I have to deal with:  I see where they’re coming from, I get they’re point of view, but they’re still wrong.