Food Fight!

If eating was a commercial enterprise, my family would be Fortune 500: BIG BUSINESS!  We don’t take eating lightly, just often and a lot.

So when the family gets together, like on my mother’s 90^th birthday, why should that week be different than any other week?  We never leave the kitchen table.

Jews and Italians are similar with our love of family and food.  With the Italians, forks and knives fly above and around their heads at record breaking speed with lively and heated conversation that would appear like life and death discussions.

But in my family unlike Italian families, eating is a different kind of art.  And like art, you observe, you admire, you are quiet in a gallery, consuming all the eye-candy and so when my brothers and niece got together with me and my mother, it was Food Gone Wild…minus any talking. Eating is serious business. Lots of nibbling, chomping, cutting, enjoying, savoring with barely a conversation between mouthfuls. Food is attacked, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4th helpings are loaded on empty plates. Moans of delight are often heard, but that’s about it...unless there are left-overs.

Left-overs? Seriously? Are you kidding? I think my 90 year old mother will need to moonlight and get extra jobs just to feed her family.  There are never left-overs.  Once a plate of sliced salami was passed around the table.  Talk about forks gone wild. And my family isn't even Italian.  One brother (notice I’m not saying who to avoid getting tickled to death) put a -let’s just say a hefty enough portion to require a cardiac intervention- amount on his plate; my other brother also took enough slices to feed a Sumo Wrestler and then some; I wasn’t in the mood for salami at the moment since I was still eating a turkey sandwich, but I knew it was either do or die~especially when I watched my brothers counting how many pieces would be left-over for them.  Quickly I took two slices and by the time I ate the itsy bitsy pieces and the tray miraculously made its way around the table again, FOOD FIGHT!  The remainders were up for grabs.

Forks appeared out of nowhere. Every man, woman and child for himself.  My mother didn’t get a portion.  As for my niece…she wouldn’t dare.  She knew her dad would give her the stink eye at some point.  And we’re only talking salami.  Imagine what went on with the cookies, pastries, homemade zucchini bread,  black and white cookies, and Tower of Treats.

In order to eat with my family, you need a course in the martial arts, like Tae Kwon Do.  You must be prepared for aggressive forms of punching (actually tickling), jabs (to the food) and blocking and choking moves: probably to me since I’m the youngest and they’ve had the most experience noodling me to tears and stealing my food.

I swear the family could save on water bills since the plates seem to be licked clean before the next portion is plated.  Who could talk with so much food to devour?  Especially my mother, The Queen of Desserts,  the hostess with the mostess, has a freezer stuffed with 25 gallons of ice cream, not including Fudgesicles and Klondike Bars. 

Frankly if Klondike wanted to do a realistic commercial, they should film at my mother’s house.  What do you do with a Klondike bar?  Well, we’d show the audience.  With one fell swoop-Gone!

Finally, everyone is stuffed, ready to explode, contented-at least reasonably so-and they sit back in their chairs and the conversation flows…something like this:

“What’s for dessert?”