Me vs. the meatloaf & The Feed Bag

My family likes to tease that I'm a picky eater, pointing to a history of vomit threats at the prospect of having to eat my mother's Seafood Bake. Seafood Bake is a vat of goo consisting of canned tuna and baby shrimp, water chestnuts, celery, cream of mushroom soup and instant rice - all mixed together and heated until steaming and nauseatingly odoriferous. It is not food, it is torture. I love my mother and I love a lot of the things that she's been kind enough to feed me all these years, but Seafood Bake is at the top of my Do Not Ingest list, followed by coins, dirt, rat poison and Cinnabuns.

Minnesotans love to make Hot Dish. A clever way to cheaply deal with the crippling cold of winter, you take a bunch of canned ingredients, mix together and bake, then serve with a ladle and you have Hot Dish, one of the local culinary treasures of this great state. Now, don't get me wrong, this cooking technique can result in some very yummy dinners, and my mother is doing her part to make sure that Hot Dish is not completely lost to the trends of say, grilling, roasting, poaching or Chinese take-out. Unfortunately, she is also trying to single-handedly save the good old country home cookin' staple grotesquely named...meatloaf.

Blagh.

One of mom's more popular ones, Hamburger Corn Hot Dish

Ground hamburger mixed with crap and then packed into a bread pan? No No No. Why is this appetizing? A loaf of meat?...you've got to be kidding me. And the idea of a meatloaf sandwich...2 pieces of bread holding a dry and pathetic misstep of a hamburger that was intentionally shaped as...a piece of bread! It boggles my small, feeble mind.

Still, mom and Popi are meatloaf lovers, which I tend to think categorizes them as non-picky eaters. So it wasn't too surprising when I asked mom where they had dinner with new friends during their stay in Mesa, AZ and she replied without hesitation, "The Feed Bag."

"What? What did you just say? Did I hear right? Did you dine at a restaurant named The Feed Bag? THE. FEED. BAG???"

"Yes! Good old home cooking!"

"Except not home cooked, because you were at a restaurant called The Feed Bag with some 83-year-old duffer named Lloyd."

"Well, the other night we went to a better restaurant with your aunt and uncle. The Weather Vane."

"What the hell, mom?! How big is Mesa, AZ? What's with all the ridiculous restaurants?"

"Mesa has over 400,000 people, Sara! It's big! There's lots of restaurants..."

"So, it's just a matter of you and Popi hanging out with the only 6 people in town who constitute mass produced meatloaf and instant mashed potatoes as a night out on the town?"

"Yep."

"Mom, if you go back to The Feed Bag I may never stop laughing."

"Well, ok then."

She's sticking to her guns. They have weeks left of this vacation and I do not doubt that I will be hearing of The Feed Bag again. In fact, I'm curious if they can top it with an eating establishment even more horrendously named. I put nothing past my parents, and now, after The Feed Bag and The Weather Vane, I put nothing past Mesa's dining community.

The start of March will bring with it my parents for a stay in L.A. after their 2 months in Arizona. Apparently Teen and I will have to gently reintroduce them to food with texture and taste. Seeing as it is California, there will likely be meals featuring yummies from the sea, but this meatloaf rehabilitation program will have nothing - and I mean nothing - to do with Seafood Bake. That's just me sticking to my guns.