When I go to a steakhouse, I get steak; I’ll have spaghetti and meatballs if we visit an Italian restaurant. This drives my wife crazy. “That’s okay,” I tell her. “I like spaghetti and meatballs. When I don’t like it anymore, I’ll quit ordering it.”

A few weeks ago, we visited our favorite Italian restaurant. I studied the menu for a long time and then said, “I believe I’ll try the spaghetti and meatballs. Do you remember if I usually get the regular sauce, or the spicy Italian?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Connie said. “Maybe if you get something different, you’ll find you like it.”

So I got the spicy Italian – and I didn’t like it. I wasted an entire meal eating the wrong spaghetti sauce. You won’t catch me doing that again.

That’s the way I grew up. My mother was an excellent cook, but she had seven kids. If Mother said we were having spaghetti and meatballs, that’s what we were having. There wasn’t any fooling around with “What kind of sauce do you want?”

Folks didn’t go to restaurants often in those days, and people with seven kids didn’t go to restaurants at all. We grew up on meat and potatoes, and whatever was doing well in the garden.

My family’s eating habits provided a good laugh for one of my brother’s neighbors years ago. My brother’s five-year-old was visiting the neighbors, and when the salad was passed at dinner, John didn’t take any.

The lady of the house said, “Don’t you want some salad, John? It’s good for you.”

“Men don’t eat lettuce,” the boy said. Obviously, he had been watching his dad.

I can’t speak for John, but I’ve tried lettuce – and even branched out into Chinese food. There’s an excellent Chinese restaurant in town, and we’ve learned they have an economical take-out menu. The food is great, but those who aren’t used to Chinese take-out should remember to remove it from those little bait buckets before serving. We used to get crickets and redworms in containers like those.

The old saying about being hungry an hour after a Chinese dinner is a bunch of baloney. You just have to know what to order. Our local restaurant has a special that lets the customer choose four items. We started out ordering barbecued pork, pork fried rice, eggrolls and chicken subgum. (The chicken subgum includes some veggies.) Later on, we substituted sweet and sour pork for the chicken subgum.

Sure, we lost the veggies, but so what? Rice is a vegetable where I come from.

Now I tell my wife, “Okay, let’s get the barbecued pork, pork fried rice, sweet and sour pork and the eggrolls. And see if there’s any way we can get some pork in those eggrolls.”

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.