Food was a big deal for me grow­ing up, whether it was the home-cooked fare that my grand­mother pro­vided when I vis­ited her house on the week­ends or the mostly box din­ners that my work­ing mom prepared.

Rather that write some long essay on that food, I thought I’d share some of the favorite meals I’ve had over the years, whether home-cooked or pre-processed.

• Peanut but­ter and jelly on white bread with Kraft blue-box mac­a­roni and cheese. The sand­wich is cut diag­o­nally and placed around the pile of yellow-orange pasta so that just a lit­tle of the cheese sauce coats the edge of the bread.
• “Noo­dle soup with but­ter­balls” made from scratch, includ­ing the tiny bit of rice and pep­per­corns found at the bot­tom of the ancient, thin-walled soup pot my grand­mother used to sim­mer the stuff all day long. It had home­made thin noo­dles, an entire chicken to gar­nish your bowl — the chicken was used to make the stock, and “but­ter­balls” — essen­tially spiced dumplings. All of it was served in my grandmother’s dec­o­ra­tive soup bowls, which were only used for this soup.
• Lit­tle Caesar’s pizza-pizza on the nights my mom got home late from work in Billings.
• Oven-finished fried chicken, with mashed pota­toes that were topped with sweet corn. The chicken was pan-fried, then left to keep warm in the oven, where the skin shrived and became the pre­cise oppo­site of crispy. Delicious.
• “Big Chow.” A recipe, as I recall, given to my mother by her then-boyfriend-now-husband. Put a dozen eggs in a pan. Scram­ble ‘em. Add torn up bits of bacon, slices of Amer­i­can cheese, and a can of Nalley’s no-bean chili. Stir. Eat on toast or tor­tillas. In the­ory, it serves many. In real­ity, you eat way too much of it for your own arteries.
• Raw sweet corn fresh from the field. Eaten on the back of a pickup full of unshucked ears.
• Car­rots from the gar­den, washed in the plastic-tasting water of a gar­den hose. Eaten with just a lit­tle resid­ual dirt, for garnish.
• “Chicken Rice.” Make some instant white rice. Top it with a mix­ture of Cream of Chicken soup and canned white-meat chicken. Serve with a pickle and a slice of raisin bread (for some reason).
• Over­cooked pork chops at my other grand­par­ents’ house, where every­thing tastes just a lit­tle like cheap, fine-ground black pepper.
• Bur­ri­tos made with the home­made refried beans my mom cooks all day long and served with the steak and sauce my mom learned to cook from years spent work­ing at a tra­di­tional Mex­i­can restaurant.

Of course, there are more, but this hits the high­lights of my culi­nary life. Some nos­tal­gic, some seem­ingly dis­gust­ing, all remem­bered fondly and still enjoyed when­ever I can get them today.