Things My Sister Ate to Make Me Sad and/or Mad

I have four sisters.

Each one of these sisters presented their own unique set of challenges as I was growing up. The two oldest ones were only concerned with boys, makeup, shoulder pads, too-long sweaters with obscenely large belts, and hairspray...lots and lots of hairspray.

It was the eighties, so there was an unnatural amount of neon everything and ridiculously large hair.

Of my other two sisters, one is older and one is younger. We three were all so relatively close in age that we were often thought of as the little kids by the two older girls. I'd like to say that we all got along wonderfully and were the best of friends, but I really don't want to lie here. Mostly it was the older one and I who didn't get along.

I honestly don't remember a time before I was seventeen in which we were actually friendly toward one another. She was always trying to get me into trouble and I was always trying to avoid giving her a reason to try and get me into trouble. I'm not sure when this rivalry turned into a sort of Culinary Cold War, but it started with the mayonnaise on the toast. Seriously...who does that?

We must have been out of butter one morning, so instead she spread Miracle Whip onto her toast. Have you ever smelled toasted bread slathered in Miracle whip at 6:45 in the morning? The two smells just don't belong together. I made the mistake of letting her know that I thought this was disgusting. That was the subtle declaration and acceptance of a years-long war of preferences between the two of us.

Over time she learned all of the various foods that I had a particular disdain for and she often requested these foods. She set her own preferences for candy, soda, ice cream, and fast food in direct opposition to my own. I liked Coke; she liked Pepsi. I liked Burger King; she liked McDonald's. I liked flavorful food; she liked bland meals.

Some of her favorite dishes that where among my all time worst were spaghetti and boiled dinner. Notice, I did not say meatballs. There were never meatballs in our spaghetti. We had a box of spaghetti noodles doused in some kind of pasty red sauce that came in a jar. We almost always had canned peas with spaghetti. I was always the last one to finish because I would make a show of how much I hated it and we stall until everyone left the table so I could slip what was left back into the bowl.

The boiled dinner was just that...a dinner that was boiled. Whenever this was served, it seemed to take all day to cook the ingredients in a giant aluminum cauldron. This dinner consisted of potatoes, carrots, cabbage and ham, all boiled to a perfectly bland grayness that stunk like wet underwear and tasted even worse. This seemed to me like something hobos would cook under a bridge in an old boot, though I'm certain their recipe probably tasted better.

Is it illegal or somehow unethical to eat any other soup than Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup with grilled cheese? I absolutely loved grilled cheese and would gladly scarf down a half dozen or more, but we always, always, always had a big old pot of red, pasty soup with it.

Now that we are adults we actually get along. She makes some pretty good brownies. I would gladly eat any meal she cooks, as long as it's not spaghetti and hasn't been boiled.