When we were growing up, my grandmother never made American food for the family to eat; we never had a turkey at Thanksgiving, for example. I can’t ever remember her frying chicken, making a pot roast, baking a cake. We ate mostly Mexican food at home. Every meal there was beans and tortillas. An egg with chile, beans and tortillas for breakfast. Lunch would often be leftovers from the evening before, or beans smeared in a tortilla with chili. At dinner, a vegetable in chili sauce, particularly on Fridays because Catholics didn’t eat meat on Fridays. Potatoes, or squash, or cabbage, or cactus, in chili sauce, with beans and tortillas. Sometimes, there was a bit of meat instead of the vegetable. Pork ribs or pork chops or beef cut into bits and cooked in chili sauce. Beans and tortillas. Always beans and tortillas. Beans and tortillas at every meal.

A few times a year, my grandmother made caldo de rez, beef bone soup. More often she made fideo, a type of noodle soup, which she prepared with chicken legs. We often got fideo for lunch, made without the chicken. There are different kinds of fideo shapes; most families traditionally prepare fideo shaped like wheels for their children. I got so I hated seeing fideo wheels. I remember we had a babysitter who made wheels fideo for me and my little brother every day for lunch. Once I got so mad seeing fideo in our bowls on the table that I took my little brother by the hand and brought him with me to school, sat him outside on a bench and went into the classroom; the babysitter found him, and as I watched through the window dragged him home by the arm. I still hate that woman. Not untypically, my grandmother adored her and stayed friends with her for years.

When I was with the children’s father, we didn’t have the money to eat out very often in our early years together. I was not a cook. I had not learned at home. I bought a Betty Crocker cookbook and tried to teach myself, but I wasn’t much good at it. Couldn’t boil water, as the saying goes. Spoiled a lot of food, burned food, threw food away that I couldn’t figure out how to prepare. I did learn how to make a few simple things, and as time went on got a little better at those things so pretty much stuck to what I knew. Spaghetti, chops, ribs, meatloaf. There was this old cookbook I found by Peg Bracken called the I Hate to Cook Book in which I found a lot of simple recipes that came out fairly well. I also tried recipes I found on the backs of jars and boxes, like the Heinz 57 meatballs or the Quaker oatmeal cookies, recipes I still use. Anything tried-and-true.

Some years ago there was a commercial for Carl’s Jr., where they show Carl at a fancy restaurant being served some strange small concoction on a fancy plate and he looks at it and at the camera like, What in the world? That’s the way I feel about food. As a cook, or as a consumer, I am not adventurous. Give me something familiar, tasty, fresh and I am happy. I don’t have any exotic spices in my kitchen, my cupboards are stocked with ordinary canned things, Del Monte tomatoes, Dole fruit cocktail, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I stick to the things I know how to make, the only big variations coming on holidays, and even those are stock recipes, like Easter ham, and canned cranberry sauce. But it’s a big deal to us, partly because these are familiar foods I can prepare well. On holidays at least one thing is going to turn out right.

In my thirties, I taught myself how to cook beans, make tortillas and prepare fideo, because by then I missed what I considered home cooking. My family considers homemade Mexican food a treat because I don’t make it that often; I realize now that my grandmother’s days of cooking were very labor intensive. She cooked beans in the pot at least once a week, made tortillas from scratch by hand at least once a week, made her chili sauces by roasting the chilies, then mashing them in her molcajete with various other ingredients, then bottled some of the sauce for use over the next few days. Whatever vegetable she made came from our garden or the store that day, whatever meat she used came from the butcher or the store that day. Everything we ate, from eggs we bought from a farm to milk we had delivered, to bread from the truck, was fresh, or nearly so, every day. Even the water we drank, we used to tote big five gallon glass bottles to a place in the back country where we could get clean cold spring water for the week.

My grandmother used to can food from her garden, mostly tomatoes and chilies. She also canned nopales, cactus. She and her sister-in-law, my tia Macaria, would go out and cut the cactus leaves from Tia Macaria’s penca, boxes of them, then they would spend the day carefully cutting the thorns off the cactus with sharp knives, outside on the front porch, the thorns falling onto the newspapers under the cactus leaves, then the women would dice the cactus and cook it, then can most of it, leaving some for that day’s meal. We ate cactus with shrimp patties, cactus mixed with eggs, cactus in chili sauce, red or green tomatillo sauce. The fruit of the cactus, red atuns, were a favorite sweet for us, and still today if I see them at the local markets I bring them home for my grandmother as a treat, though she always says they are not as good as fresh.

My grandmother would love to shop and when she took us with her, sometimes we would stop to eat a hamburger at a drive-up place. If we were downtown at the Woolworth’s we ate a slice of pizza. Eating out for us was a major big deal. When my own children were growing up, we mostly ate meals at home, but at least once a week we would eat out at McDonalds or Pizza Hut. As the children got bigger and life became busier and our money situation improved we ate out more often, mostly at drive-throughs like Jack in the Box. For us to go to a sit-down restaurant like Denny’s was something we may have done once a year or less. In my long years with the children’s father, never once did we go into a fancy restaurant, well, nothing fancier than the old Spaghetti Factory downtown (three times).

When my daughter started college, she made friends who knew about different kinds of food and places to eat, and she especially learned to love Japanese food; sometimes she would take me to places in Kearney Mesa where she shopped at exotic little shops and we would eat in these places that prepared Japanese food. I was leery, but ate whatever she put in front of me. She and I took courses together at City College; sometimes when we had money we would go and eat in the cafeteria; mainly we ate bean burritos from the Taco Bell food stand, they were cheap and tasted pretty good if you asked for extra onions and doused them with hot sauce.

I remember when I was growing up telling my grandmother that I would never learn to make tortillas, and would never eat them or beans when I had my own home. She was amused, and perhaps a little proud of my ambition to be so rich I would not have to eat beans, but also a little hurt, I think. Time has changed all that, of course; I can eat out every day now if I want, and I can treat myself to pretty much whatever I want, but what I often want is homemade beans and tortillas. In the morning, after my grandmother has had her early morning coffee and pastry and we are thinking about what to have for a late breakfast, if she says, “I wouldn’t mind having a tortilla,” I head over to Las Cuatro Milpas for eggs and chorizo and beans with a side of hot flour tortillas and red chili. Or at lunch, I go and get little pork ribs in red chili sauce with beans and tortillas from Rolando’s up the street.

Tomorrow I am making beef bone soup, with chamorro and chayote and cabbage and corn and carrots, just like my grandmother used to prepare it. It will take all day. I will have to get in line for fresh corn tortillas at Sawaya’s or Gabriel’s, which means a wait. But it will be worth it. Nothing like caldo de rez with hot corn torts to satisfy my hunger for childhood food. Nothing except tamales and no one can make them like my grandmother and she doesn’t make them anymore. That part of my life is gone. Lost.

My son doesn’t like homemade Mexican food, although he used to eat my grandmother’s bean burritos when she still cooked. He will eat Del Taco and Taco Bell. Today I was busy straightening my grandmother’s clothes, her table full of medications and medical supplies, and she kept herself occupied cleaning off her chair, sitting on the ottoman and picking off the bits of lint and crumbs and throwing them into her little waste can. Since it is Saturday, I went late in the morning to get a container of menudo from Rolando’s for me and my grandmother, then pulled into the Del Taco drive-through line to get some egg burritos for my son; the menudo from Rolando’s is scalding hot so I knew it would still be hot by the time I got home and served it up with chopped cilantro, diced onions, red chili salsa, ground oregano and a squeeze of lemon to top off the steaming bowls.

Ahead of me in a black Toyota was a young couple; the fellow’s haircut suggested he might be in the Navy. The young woman, college age, would bring her face close to the young man who would turn and gaze at her for a moment then they would kiss. They kissed probably five or six times this way in the minutes I followed them through the line, with the girl turning from her seat to get close to the guy and the guy bending to meet her lips and they would kiss, not outrageously or for very long, but intensely for a moment. The way they kissed made me think that they had spent the night together, perhaps for the first time, and were probably headed back to bed once they had eaten whatever it was they had ordered. Even at the window, when the guy had paid and they were waiting for their food, she didn’t waste the minute, again moving close to her man and he turning to kiss her. The drinks came and she took hers and settled into her seat, he took the food bags and they drove off. I doubt if they cared what they ate so long as they were together.