Way (and I’m talking WAY) back in my serious weight-loss days (2005-2009), I belonged to a fabulous (and eclectic) online group on the Weight Watchers website for people who wanted to lose 100 pounds, give or take. There, I met (and am still friends with) people who challenged everything I thought about weight standards, body image, and the don’t-eat-this-eat-that/move-more-eat-less culture.
Still, we shared a lot of recipes that we’d modified to fit into the “Points” program. I’ve hung on to a few (Hearty Lentil Spaghetti being one of my favorites), and some I’ve lost. (Whoever has the Unstuffed Cabbage Rolls recipe, could you send it my way?)
And then there’s this one: Honey Mustard Vinaigrette.
I’d been up to my eyeballs in all things honey mustard in the 2000 aughts, and so I didn’t try it. Then yesterday, I found it in my recipe folder and decided, Why not? I omitted the Splenda because it makes my mouth feel like plastic, and substituted a teaspoon of sugar. I let it age overnight, and it turned out bigly delicious!
Today, I made a spinach salad with a hard-boiled egg, grilled salmon, sliced mushrooms, grape tomatoes, and homemade multigrain croutons. (The bread I used was on the edge of dead). A poured on about two to three tablespoons of vinaigrette, and let me tell you: No restaurant salad compares to that salad!
For a minute I thought, I really need to market this! But, of course, that can never happen because I have zero business sense, and it would also mean that I’d have to make food for people other than my family, and that makes me all kinds of anxious.
Now for a complete 180.
After I finished the best-ever salad, my brother—the one with the short-term memory loss and who lives in assisted living—called and said he’s letting his beard grow “in tribute to Dad.”
What??
My brother is not a touchy-feely kind of guy. He’s never, in all my nearly 60 years (that I can recall), said anything to me about loving or caring about our father. But here he is, growing his beard because he is thinking about Dad.
That hit me in ALL the feels this afternoon, after already feeling pretty fine from that brilliant salad. This means that, starting today, Honey Mustard Vinaigrette and my brother’s Dad-honoring beard-growing will forever be tied together in my head, a double helix rotating in my memory.
I love when random thoughts and memories come together in a cohesive–albeit seemingly impossible–place. I love that I found that recipe, faded to yellow. And I love that my brother, with all his daily confusion and reticence, called to tell me—in his own way—that he loves and misses Dad.
Because, buddy, so do I.
Lynn Haraldson, Author and Writing Mentor 