pigs in blankets.

The soup was on the second to last step. The salads were ready and on the table, along with jars of blue cheese and ranch dressings. The bread was in the oven. The soup was a new recipe, Italian Meatball soup. I'd given it plenty of time, according to the instructions, but these things always seem to take longer than the recipe says. Maybe it's me, or maybe people who post recipes online have a different understanding of time.

I've been working on my complete meals. For a long time, when I made dinner, that meant one big dish. If one serving didn't fill you up, have another. There were no sides. If I said we were having lasagna, then that is exactly what we were having. Lasagnas have tomatoes in them, and tomatoes are vegetables, right? Or are they fruit? Same food group anyway.

I noticed we were not getting a lot of vegetables that way. So I've been trying to make dinner with more than one item on it. You know, side dishes. A lot of times, I just throw together a salad. That feels like cheating, but it's a start.

So anyway, the soup was simmering when Josh came in from work. I told him dinner was not quite ready, which is usually what I say when he comes in. Try as I might, I haven't quite got the knack for having dinner being exactly ready when he walks in the door. Of course, he doesn't care at all, and I don't care all that much. It's not the fifties.

"We need to make pigs in blankets." He had not ever said that to me before. And what an odd use for the word "need." Has anyone, in the history of the world, ever "needed" to make pigs in blankets before?

"Huh?"

"We need to make pigs in blankets with vienna sausages and canned biscuits." Vienna sausages? My goodness, I'd forgotten those existed. I'd like to forget again.

"Um. Okay. Right now?" Surely he didn't mean right at that second. I mean, it was almost 11 PM. I had soup on the stove. Homemade soup with homemade meatballs that I rolled out myself.

"Yes." Huh. I guess he did mean right that second.

"Well, okay, I don't have those things. We can go to the store." Look at me, rolling with the punches! I'm hip, I can be spontaneous. I can make pigs in blankets whenever my man needs them. I just won't look at the price I'm paying and it will be totally fine.

"No, I already have everything."

"You went to the store on your way home?"

"Yeah."

"Alright then, we can do that." Seriously, what the heck was going on?

The oven was already pre-heated for the French bread. I got out a baking sheet and got ready to wrap some pigs. I picked up the can of sausages. They looked just like I remember. Perhaps the Armour company should invest in some new labels. I opened them up, ugh. They had that...goo on them. It looked like amniotic fluid, as if the Mama sausage had birthed them right into the can.

You know, even when I was a kid, I knew that something was not quite right with vienna sausages. We never had them at my house, because they were expensive and unnecessary. But some kids at school brought them in for lunch. A can of vienna sausages, a pack of Handi-Snack, a pudding cup, and a juice box. That passed for lunch in those days. My lunch items were all individually packaged, too, but in the kind containers you use for leftovers and sandwich bags. Even the drink was Kool-aid in a jar. My mom would get me Handi-Snacks or Fruit Snacks as a treat for morning snack time, but it was always made clear to me that they were Special, to be eaten at Snack Time, only One A Day, and if I catch you eating any more, then they would be gone Forever. I thought the other kids were rich, because their parents bought things for them that my parents said were too expensive. Now, I think that those other parents were just not as careful with their money. So I had a natural obsession with vienna sausages, though it was nothing compared to my obsession with Lunchables. But the few times I tried them (by getting someone to share), I was less than impressed. Maybe my poor peasant taste buds were just unfit for food meant for royalty.

Josh washed the goo off the sausages. He showed me how to stretch out the biscuit dough, put the pig inside and then wrap them up so they looked like little pies. It was a lot easier than making French bread.

"Sorry about this. We just always use to have pigs in blankets on Superbowl Sunday, back when we didn't have any money. We never got to have them any other time. I never cared about football, but I would beg for these."

A-ha! That explains why I spent an evening making soup from scratch, baking bread, and chopping salad, and all of a sudden I had to wrap meat that came from a can in biscuit dough packed in a container that will explode in a hot car. Money-wise, Josh had two very different periods of his childhood - before and after his mother married an anesthesiologist. So that's why he craves his mom's tapenade (actual rich people food), but then comes home with a hankering for potted meat. I am all for food-based nostalgia. I personally prefer my mac and cheese to come from a blue box. I've made it from scratch, and it's not the same. It's like a different food altogether. Sure, it's good, but it's not mac and cheese. It tastes too much like real cheese.

"So does it have to be vienna sausages and canned biscuits? I'm not trying to mess with your childhood here. But my inclination would be to take real hot dogs and just make some dough."

"It has to be this."

"Alrighty." Like the blue box, it has to be this way. I can handle it once a year. We finish wrapping up the pigs and put them in the oven. By the time they were ready, the soup is also done, and dinner is served: salad with homemade dressing, baked from scratch French bread, fresh Italian Meatball soup, and canned sausage wrapped in canned biscuits.

I tried a pig in a blanket. The biscuit was fine, though no one would mistake it for Grandma's. But then I got to the sausage and the taste of them came screaming back to me. Mmm, meat-based product.

"You don't like the pigs in blankets, do you?" He knew. I ate two without a word, but he knew.

"It's not my favorite." That is code between us. It means "No, I don't like this food, but I will eat it without complaint if you put it in front of me because I know you prepared it with love."

"If you want, we can try and make it with hot dogs and real dough. I bet it's a lot better."

In my head, I was already thinking of how to do this, what kind of dough would work best with a delicious Nathan's Famous hot dog. But then I immediately felt bad about it. I can't tamper with his childhood snack, not when he comes home so full of purpose that we have them. No, it has to be this way. It is more important for him to have this taste-link than for me to have the most delicious snack. His grandmother recently sent us some pictures of Josh when he was about six or seven, little and ash-blond and missing teeth, but still I can recognize the eyes, the mouth, the head shape. I can't deny pigs in blankets to that little boy, not when I love so much the man he became. He could staple one of those photos to a stick and then wave it at me every time he wants me to do something.

I have silly daydreams of my future children having favorite dishes that I make them. When they are grown, they will come home and ask that I make them again. They will ask for the recipe to make it themselves, but it won't be as good as when I make it. They will go out to restaurants and order the same thing, whatever it is, but again will be disappointed. I have this taste-link, and Josh has this taste-link, and it seems like something would be lost if my kids didn't have a taste associated with home and childhood. It won't do me any harm if I have to eat vienna sausages every Superbowl Sunday, even for the rest of my life.

But then I worry that the things that my kids will associate with my house and my cooking is those pigs in blankets.