The biggest disadvantage of being raised by my single father was having to eat his cooking. My father and I both viewed cooking as a mysterious, unfathomable process on par with raising a child from the dead or constructing a nuclear submarine using nothing but a hatchet. There was something vaguely suspicious about it, and we avoided it at all costs.
As a result, we subsisted almost entirely on 1 percent milk and industrial-size bags of trail mix. This seemed perfectly normal until my first day of second grade, when I took a seat at the cafeteria table. Around me, my classmates grasped their Disney lunchboxes and began removing Lunchables, Dunkaroos and Fruit by the Foot. I, on the other hand, opened a squashed brown paper bag to behold a sandwich that would eventually come to be known as the Tom Harman special: whole-wheat pita bread smeared with organic, non-hydrogenated peanut butter and Polaner’s All-Fruit, stuffed in a plastic baggie and topped with a large apple. The location of the apple was key, as it squished all the jelly out of the sandwich and into the baggie. My Frito-munching classmates stopped chewing and stared at me as if I produced a dead mouse. Even the teacher wrinkled her nose.
From then on, I took responsibility for grocery shopping. It didn’t matter what I bought; we weren’t going to eat it anyway. Every week I removed the previous week’s rotting fruits and vegetables from the refrigerator door to make room for new ones, only to reopen the fridge a week later and perform the same ritual. For us, grocery shopping was a matter of habit, like brushing your teeth before bed or saying “Bless you” after someone sneezes. In time, it became as ritualistic as a Thanksgiving turkey—except we didn’t really have one of those either. Our holiday meal strategy revolved around exploiting my father’s status as the only single man in the neighbourhood in order to extract dinner invitations from a group of women we privately referred to as ‘the church ladies’—a gaggle of thirty-somethings from the Presbyterian church. This worked so well that we often ended up with multiple invitations and thus attended three or four Thanksgiving dinners.
My father’s most memorable attempt at cooking occurred when I was in eleventh grade. Prepared in a bathtub-sized pot, his creation included all of the rotting vegetables from the crisper, plus whatever seasonings happened to be within arm’s reach, including most of a box of baking soda. It was promptly christened ‘concentration camp soup,’ and though neither of us ate it, we couldn’t bring ourselves to throw it away, either. After a few days it became clear that if we didn’t do something with it soon, it would crawl out of the pot and attack us.
Unfortunately, it didn’t get that far. As fate would have it, I had invited a few friends over to swim, including the guy I had crush on. In a moment of weakness, I left them unattended by the pool while I went to change into my swimsuit. When I returned, I found the object of my affection nearly as green as the soup. Needless to say, my father had seized the opportunity to ply his soup on our unsuspecting guests. Being the polite southern boy that he was, my crush had managed to choke down a few spoonfuls before I returned. He never came to my house again, and he ended up asking my best friend—whose mother is famous for her lasagne—to prom.
My father claims I should be thankful, as anyone stupid enough to eat soup the color of a Ninja Turtle clearly didn’t deserve to be my prom date. However, it wasn’t until I arrived at college that I realized just how beneficial my culinary-disadvantaged childhood had been. While my friends moaned and complained about rubbery pizza and institutional French fries, I just smiled quietly. Because after a lifetime of squished peanut butter and pita bread sandwiches, Leo’s is positively delicious.
