Back where I come from we have our own special culinary delights. My favorite, especially on New Year’s Eve, is sauerkraught, kielbasi, pork roast, and mashed patatos. New Year’s eve is a blast. New Year’s Day is too if you get too close to an open flame when you cut one. And you will.

That’s not why we do it, of course. It embarrasses us when it happens. It’s really embarrassing when it happens in a “special moment”. It’s the leading cause of divorce in Pennsylvania.

“Well Your Honor, how would you like it?”, she says.

“Divorce granted.”

In West Virginia it’s not a cause for divorce. In fact, it’s not even noticed. The whole state smells like that anyways. They advertise it as part of the “allure”. Never, I mean never, drive with your outside vent on in West Virginia. Your life insurance won’t pay off plus your wife might think it’s you and sayonara.

Another of our delights is “milk-bread”. You rip bread into chunks, pour milk and sugar on it and throw it in the garbage. No, you eat it. Mom had us convinced it was “exactly” the same as Wheaties. Since we never had Wheaties we didn’t know. We should have since it didn’t look the same. It looked like it sounds. Try eating that crap for breakfast all you growing years and you’ll be a little “off” too.

Don’t get me started about pressure cooked chicken. The only saving grace to that is that it makes throwing it back up easier. We never had a choice of dark or white meat. It was all pink. It actually didn’t have a bad flavor. It actually didn’t have a flavor...until it came back up. Then it tasted like milk-bread.

Then there’s the traditional pot roast. The trick at the dinner table was to see who could pull off the longest string. The record is 27 feet. In with the roast went patatos, celery, onions, and carrots. Notice that two of those have very little taste raw. Imagine pressure cooking them. You can’t, can you?

A biggie is raisin pie. I’ve been teased so much I won’t eat it anymore. That and the fact that my wife refuses to bake it on “general principles”. Yea, this from a woman that put mayonnaise in her pinto beans.

Traditions should be respected. It the bridge to our past and we should never lose sight of that. Having said that, I don’t ever want to see milk-bread again.

Ever.