What Mike Davis’ family put into his ofrenda, and what he offered them to help them, as reported by the New York Times Magazine
The holiday dinner. It’s tradition. It’s a thing. A time-honored practice, the kind of thing that makes me nostalgic for those early Christmases spent with my grandparents.
I’m speaking now not of the sort of dinner that features the food you could imagine your grandparents serving but the sort of dinner they served with their own hands. Dinner. That’s food. Their food. Food that they made, as they were making it, they took it home, they made it with family members, and then they ate it with them.
In recent decades I’ve had to make this sort of dinner less and less. In order to pay the bills and feed my family, I have to go to fast food. Sometimes even McDonald’s. And while there are some nice restaurants popping up where we can eat with the convenience of a drive-through, that’s not what’s important to me.
What’s important is to get that dinner.
I have a few things I’ve learned making this sort of dinner, things I learned from my grandmother.
It’s the type of meal where the process and the results are the same, the process being the meal.
I’ve had to learn to keep in mind the following:
Cook the food exactly how you want it.
Do it as simple as possible.
Take everything out when it’s done. If possible, toss it into the garbage before you use it again.
When you’re done cooking, it’s best to let it cool and be able to throw it away.
The end result has always been good. There’s no way to guarantee it. The cooking is the most important.
When I’m at home, I like to serve homemade
