Epicness

Our family loves epic meals~ 

One comes to mind.  My husband is a meat cutter.  One Friday night he brought home some pizza fixins.  Fresh mozzarella cheese and his bulk sausage.  The cheese was the freshest, heaviest, yummiest cheese we ever had on a pizza.  This pizza masterpiece was a good 8 pounds if it was one.  A Friday night favorite.  The three of us enjoyed it with a coke and a movie.  I think of that night lovingly, cherishing the memory of sharing a meal together as we so often did.

There are a couple of things that we never have gone without.  A summer fruit salad...a must.  Fresh.  Did I say fresh?  Watermelon, cantaloupe, grapes, strawberries.  You know the routine.  Fresh.  Lewis tradition.

Potato salad made with dill pickles.  Must be dill.  Plenty of mayo. Totally yummy.   Eastlick tradition.

Fried chicken.  Yep.  Fried in grease, wanna piece?  Probably my husband's favorite.

Food was always a center, a reason to come together each and every night at our dinner table.  To share our day, to break bread, to love on our family.  The importance of the family dinner table was a generational event for both my husband and I.  Both of us grew up around, across from and by our family during these epic events.  Only, I'm not sure we realized how epic they were.

One memory I have of the dinner table while growing up in a house of 6 girls, is this little game my sister and I had with each other.  "Since you're up, could you get me a glass of water too, please."  Always obligatory of each other, but not always kind.  A lot of times that glass would be filled with hot water when it returned to the table. The funny part is it always went both ways and always brought a laugh.  So you ended up getting up for water anyway but this was way more fun.

This same sister and I have our favorite things to create.  Two of our favorite creations were rootbeer and crepes.  One particular day one of our older sisters came home during one of our creative kitchen times. We were home alone and we were just totally silly.  We saw her come down the long, dusty driveway.  We were prepared.  Right before she came in the front door, we went out the back door.  I don't really know what we were trying to prove but we ran around the house, waited a few minutes to see her wonderment of an empty house with a destroyed kitchen.  Tired of our silly game, we burst in the front door in laughter that could fill a room.  She failed to see our humor.  That, of course, made us laugh all the more. 

One night at dinner, I had invited my boyfriend to eat with us.  This memory is actually funnier if he tells this story; he's my husband.  Hard to believe that the Lewis dinner time didn't scare him off.  He likes to tell this story of my dad, starved after a long day of work, anticipating the big glass of ice cold milk.  My dad took a long, satisfying gulp.  He put the glass down, looked around and the look on his face was priceless.  "AAARRRGGG"....he growled.  "Sour" was his next word.  The glass of milk he had just drank half of was curdled.  We all busted up.  I'm pretty sure my dad always smelled his milk from that day on.

Epic memories.