The best part of Zombie hunting in winter

W1: Nostalgia; oh how the taste of you clings.

I am not particularly transient, and rarely leave Athens county, but with the number of places I have lived, my relatively (no pun intended) minimal connection to family and the shaky quality of my long-term memory the idea of home becomes less centralized. There are some foods that have carried through all of my homes, though. When I lived with my mother, breakfast was generally cereal and toast, lunch would be an English muffin sandwich and dinner would either be a pre-packaged frozen meal or a canned soup base with extra rice, vegetables and seasonings added. The frozen dinners, milk and sandwich fillings would all be of the healthy, low-cal’ sort since my mother did the shopping and was a recovering obsessive-compulsive calorie counter. On weekends, I would make breakfast. This would usually be pancakes or scrambled eggs. Even though we never really cooked meals, the house is still full of hundreds of cookbooks, most dating from at least thirty years ago.

Dessert was the main thing both my mother and I actually cooked. Cakes and brownies began as boxed mixes and were modified with extra flavoring or unsweetened cocoa powder that was bought in bulk and stored in almost every kitchen drawer. I would make oatmeal, peanut butter and chocolate cookies by the sheet, coated in heavy fudge icing and cut them into squares. Over summer vacations I would determine the number and size of the cookies by the amount of time I intended to spend watching movies, with six roughly 2.5” by 2.5” bars allocated to an average two hour film. To this day, baking and breakfast remain the limits of my culinary ability.

The Wizards Guild, the local comic book shop, is as much home to me as any place. I have been going there, with a few exceptions, at least once a week since 1997 and have been an official employee for the past five years. The store’s location uptown and its proximity to various restaurants means that a bite of Bagel Street Deli carries as much nostalgia for me as any homemade family recipe. The particular routine I’ve developed is a trip to next door’s Donkey café before work for the mega-dose of caffeine that is required to do a Wednesday shift solo at a comic book store. I order a Large Shot in the Dark (capitalized to better illustrate the acronym that the counterculture-loving baristas so enjoy using to “save time” confirming my customary coffee order: The usual LSD for you, Sam?), which is two shots of espresso in black coffee, with dark roast and usually flavored syrup. A few sips of that puts me in the perfect mood to sit down behind the counter, open up a Gotham Central collection and wait for the first customer of the day to walk in so I can tell them that the comic they want to buy isn’t as good as the obscure ‘70s comic it was influenced by. Because that is what home means to me.

The last thing I ate was a slice of leftover Avalanche pizza with barbecue sauce, onion, cheddar, gorgonzola and mushroom toppings.

If you truly are what you eat, then I am several thousand burritos.

The first food culture most people are exposed to is the one that they get from their parents. My mother’s family background and food history is almost entirely eastern European. On my mother’s side, everyone cooks pastries, kielbasa (pronounced ko-baw-see) and a dozen dishes featuring noodle dough, potatoes, cabbage and butter. Over the last decade, I have grown much less connected to family, and have consequently strayed from a regular diet of these foods. I still love pierogies, though.

As an Athens native, I have always associated myself with the local food scene. While far from a strict locovore, I much prefer fresh food and familiar restaurants to the supermarkets and chain eateries. Work has kept me from the Wednesday meeting of the farmers’ market for years, but I have been known to stop by on a Saturday morning to buy a few salsas and vegetables while consuming at least double their weight in free samples. There are at least seven restaurants in Athens that have, at one time or another, started preparing “the usual” when I walked in the door.

Personal preference has drawn me to the world of American Mexican cuisine. There is little I enjoy more than a plate of chips or rice with spiced meat, cooked vegetables, cheese and a salsa that demonstrates there is a difference between “salty” and “spicy”. As with any widely popular food, the burrito is one of the more versatile vehicles for food presentation, as well as one of the most delicious. There are of course the traditional fillings of rice, beans, peppers and possibly meat and cheese, and beyond the vast assorted types of those there is a world of possibility waiting to be wrapped in a tortilla.

Despite my association with the so-called geek and gamer cultures, I do not share their stereotypical affinity for sugary neon sodas or orange chemical laden corn chips (I am not above a root beer or cherry cola on occasion, though). For one thing, the sticky drinks and encrusted powders tend to stain comics and cards and gum up game controllers. I have tried to point out the inherently self-destructive nature of my subculture’s snack choices, but it seems that like Cassandra or, more accurately for my literary background, Jor-El my warnings are doomed to be forever unheeded.