Isabella’s Family Meal
Tonight, after an extravagant Christmas Eve dinner topped off by amazing tofu canolis, my sister Isabella showed us some of her college essays. I asked her if I could publish this one. The topic is: write about a meal with your family…
I smell frying tofu. My family trickles into the dining room to sit around the big wooden table as we do every evening. There is a big cast-iron frying pan full of tofu teriyaki. In a blue and white dish that used to be my maternal great-grandmother’s is kale with garlic and oil. The pressure-cooker full of brown rice sits on a trivet made from corks — a gift from my aunt.
My family and I are vegetarians, practically vegan. We do not eat meat, eggs, milk or dairy products, except for a little cheese once in a while (and that’s only because my dad is Italian). A lot of people are shocked when I tell them I am a vegetarian. “What’s left for you to eat?” they exclaim. Well, when you have an Italian father and a Jewish mother who love to cook, you eat a wide variety of things.
As I look around the table, I can see that my siblings are each unique. Luke is still dressed from his volleyball tournament earlier in the day. Willie is tanned from the California sun. We miss him a lot, but he likes living there. Jess has an AFL-CIO pin on her shirt. She organizes unions for a living. Monica loves to play the guitar, as the calluses on her fingertips show. Luke, Willie and Jess have a different father from Monica and I. However, we were all raised in the same house by the same woman and we share the basic values of delicious food, a passion for life and, most importantly, family.