I met my first real friends in the backyard of my parent’s suburban Ohio house as soon as I was able to play outside alone: two sisters, both with impossibly blonde hair and blue eyes who had all new toys and a hill to sled ride down in the winter. Our first meeting went something like this:

“Hi, I’m Andrea. Want to be my friend?”

“Uhh… sure, I guess if we have to.”

From that point on (maybe it took a little prodding) we were The Three Musketeers, the inseparable trio. Except for the times I’d take sides with the older of the two girls and we’d torment her sister until she ran home, crying to her mom. It sounds mean but I credit those as her formative years that built up a strong backbone for the inevitable life suck that is high school. I’d like to think it was my doing that propelled her into a high-profile, government career under Obama’s administration while the rest of us minions work to scrape pennies together from our overdue and underpaid freelance gigs. At the time, it must have seemed like her world was crumbling around her but in the end, I was actually doing her a massive favor. I digress.

 A few times a week during the summers, I’d eat dinner with their family and was always amazed by their culinary prowess.

“How come you don’t ever make meatloaf?” I asked my mother one night at bedtime.

“Because it’s gross,” she said, rolling her eyes at my enamored excitement and obvious disappointment in our family’s food repertoire.

But after weeks of pleading, meatloaf finally arrived at our dinner table, much to the chagrin of my all-knowing father. It must be said that my Romanian-born mother didn’t cook as a way to celebrate life – she cooked out of necessity and I think, often with disdain. It seemed that her assimilation into American life was to rebel against the poverty of her youth and forgo any lessons in the kitchen, instead planning that she’d marry into a rich household, complete with a maid and private chef. When that didn’t happen, it seemed she turned her frustration onto burning the pot roast or expertly turning the pork chops into shoe leather.

Needless to say, my mother’s meatloaf was not the moist, flavorful masterpiece I’d savored at the neighbors. I shrugged my shoulders, firmly decided that exotic dinners like meatloaf should only be enjoyed outside the home and put my plate into the dishwasher.

Unfortunately, my mother saw it differently. It seems that her foray into iconic Midwest foods opened her eyes to the wonder of the one-dish-meal. Meatloaf became a staple of our weekly rotation, alongside an endless array of casseroles, each more indescribable and unrecognizable than the last. I began spending more and more time at the neighbor’s house, hoping that if I stayed long enough, a dinner invite would eventually come. When school started back up in the fall, nights in the backyard with friends were few and far between. I furiously brainstormed ideas about how to change our dinner dynamic.

I started campaigning for TV meals, complete with congealed pudding and rubbery corn. It wasn’t that this food was particularly good, and looking back, I’m not sure that it was even food to begin with. But like the meatloaf once was, it was foreign and ostensibly forbidden. And so I begged. For pizza Lunchables and bear shaped chicken nuggets, for astronaut ice cream and limp, curly fries. My mother rarely gave into my wishes, but when she did, I quietly internalized it as a small victory. Sadly, it never lasted long. She soon stopped taking me grocery shopping with her because she grew tired of explaining to the clerk that, “No, we didn’t want the Lunchable with attached Capri-Sun.” Could he please put it back?

Over the years, we came to some compromises. I was allowed a Pepsi and a bowl of popcorn with extra butter only on Friday nights when my sisters and I gathered around the tube for TGIF (Thanks Goodness It’s Friday), a weekly line-up of four shows (Full House, Step-By-Step, Saved By The Bell and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper) that defined my pre-pubescent generation and labeled you an immediate outcast if you couldn’t recite the dialogue at recess on Monday:

In turn, I spent more time in the kitchen, learning how to work with my hands and for the first time, falling intensely in love with food. I baked pies, shucked corn and took an extreme interest in how my dad made our French toast on Sunday mornings. Instead of shopping marathons (ok, there were those too), weekends at my Italian grandmother’s house turned into cooking seminars, where I learned to make a litany of dishes like homemade spaghetti and pasta sauce, s-shaped anise cookies and yes, even meatloaf.

One that my mom and I could both agree on.