DINNER TIME

When I was growing up, we ate simple meals; tacos, hamburgers & hot dogs, spaghetti & fried chicken on special occasions.  I don’t remember having desserts much & we certainly never had treats or snacks.  We ate at mealtimes because we couldn’t afford eating between meals – maybe an apple or an orange (or any other fruit we could pick from a neighbor’s yard).  We never went to fast food - I do remember going to McDonald’s one time when I was a kid – we went to the drive-in movies as a family & stopped by to get a cheap McDonald’s hamburger on the way.  When I got to high school, I discovered fast food as I went with friends who typically bought food for me because I never had any money.  Taco Bell was a favorite, we could get a taco for a quarter or a burrito for 50 cents.

As a young mother, I didn’t know how to cook very well, but it didn’t matter much because our meals were simple & inexpensive.  I used to have to add rice to our ground beef to make it stretch, a trick I learned from Relief Society.  The Carter kids were good eaters & did not complain about the food they were served.  There seemed to be enough food.  Jeff worked long hours at the hospital & was seldom home for dinner.  We ate at the Carter’s many times on Sundays & often during the week when Grandmommy babysat while I worked at the gym.  Sundays at the Carters were always hamburgers because it was simple & easy & Granddaddy insisted it be a “day of rest” from the kitchen for Grandmommy.

Dinners with the MidCart kids was crazy!  10 kids crowded around an 8 person table – Dad & I stood to eat at the counter most of the time or waited till the kids were all done.   There was always lots of food & I stressed about the amount of food we went through & how much it cost.  Dad was always there to help me & he was a wonderful provider.  We didn’t eat fancy, but we ate healthy.  Dinner time was a stressful time for me in general – someone invariably didn’t like what was fixed & I worried about that way too much.  There was lots of “happy noise” around our dinner table that took me years to get used to!   One year, in our annual Christmas letter, Paul documented the amount of food we consumed.  He wrote that in one week we could consume "nine loaves of bread, seven gallons of milk, 32 eggs, & 38 pancakes" and that was just for breakfast!