I grew up hearing on Sunday mornings the pow-pow-pow of my mom beating a round steak into submission on its way to becoming Swiss steak. Well, not every Sunday morning, because some times it was Shake'nBake chicken she was fixing. Into the oven, then off to church. Yes, a long-winded preacher received our scorn while eating an overcooked meal.
When I got married, my husband told me that his family's tradition was to go out for lunch after church. Hmm, it didn't take me long to decided that I liked his family's plan better than what I had grown up with! So we've always gone out after church, and more often to Taco Bueno or McDonald's than anywhere else, as fits our station in life. :-)
I was recently talking about the topic of Sunday dinner with someone and later I mentioned it to my husband. At that point he told me "the rest of the story." Turns out that his dad started the eating out tradition in direct response to what he had grown up with--his mother always said she couldn't go to church because she needed to stay home and cook Sunday dinner. He never wanted that to be the case in his own family.
Someone's actions from more than half a century ago are still influencing me. In a good way.
