Lately, I’ve been thinking about how I have very few vivid food memories from the first 30 years of my life. Besides the past couple of years during which food has consumed most of my brain space, it’s mostly a blur.

I do know that I can credit my most significant childhood food memories to my mom - she kept fried deer steak, spaghetti, bbq ribs, lasagna, and tuna fish salad on regular rotation, and she’d whip up a rich shrimp fettuccine alfredo on special occasions. She baked a lot, too; cowboy cookies are still her speciality, and every year she would present a time-consuming coconut cake to my Papaw for his birthday. On beautifully lucky days, my Mamaw’s banana pudding would spontaneously appear at our backdoor, and I would immediately, blissfully dig in.

As a teenager, I think I was fueled solely by fast food, and definitely the fastest food at lunch as we rushed into town on our frightfully short lunch breaks during high school. In hindsight, it was perhaps unwise to allow a bunch of teenagers with sparkly new driver’s licenses to swarm local eateries and choke down food quickly enough to get back to class on time. While working summer days and school-year evenings at the Cameo, Magnolia’s premier and only movie theater (RIP), my coworkers and I would occasionally splurge for takeout from the basic Japanese restaurant in town, but more often we’d swing through the nearest Dairy Queen drive-thru or order pizza. On busy days, overly buttered popcorn was often my dinner of choice.

For most of my college and early adulthood years, I was vegetarian and then pescatarian (cooking meat seemed difficult at the time, okay?). That time period is mostly a haze of lackluster roasted or steamed vegetables, poorly cooked rice, under-seasoned tilapia, and meatless pastas. Microwaveable meals and baked potatoes were constants. I baked more than I cooked and claimed baking as one of my skills despite very limited supporting evidence. My recipes of choice were all Pinterest-based and basic. It’s all barely memorable.

All that being said, I actually still love a lot of those foods and wouldn’t turn up my nose at them nowadays (too much, at least… a girl’s gotta have standards). Roasted vegetables are now treated much more thoughtfully and are glorified by the best spices, sauces, and acids I can find. A few years ago, I had a craving for my mom’s fried deer steak. The butcher shamed my southern accent when he inquisitively corrected, “You mean venison?” upon my request for deer meat, but I got my hands on it and fried it as best as I could at the time (this is worth a revisit soon - schnitzel meets deer steak, perhaps?) Though my college dorm room rice cooker was cheap and basic, I still remember the intoxicating scent of freshly steamed rice it released, and my current beloved rice cooker evokes the same smell memory every time I plant my face in its steam. I got my hands on my Mamaw’s banana pudding recipe, and it’s the only one I’ll ever make. And, of course, I’ll never say no to fast food!

You will never make me go back to microwavable food and Pinterest, however.