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Emily Hawkes / Food Styling: Lauren LaPenna / Prop Styling: Karin Olsen
Allow me to set the scene: a kitchen table in 1999, Sunday morning. The smell of frozen waffles toasting fills the room, and the theme song to “The Wild Thornberrys” can be heard playing faintly in another. My older sister, Morgan, and I emerge from our rooms bedheaded and bleary-eyed around 9 or even 10 a.m., never missing an opportunity to sleep in. It’s a quality we inherited from our mom, who likely would have slept in even longer if it weren’t for our cacophony of sisterly squabbles. Any minute now, my mom will be bringing our Happy Face Breakfasts to the table.
When I was growing up, the weekend in our house had rhythm, a kind of yin and yang. Saturdays were for accomplishing things—my parents hustled through their to-do lists to maintain the steady drumbeat of an active family of four. Aside from the occasional Costco run with my dad (which meant free samples, riding around in gigantic carts, and highlighter illustrations on receipts—basically Disney World for a 5-year-old), my sister and I were typically left at home to fend for ourselves.
And what are two unsupervised minors left to do in an empty house with empty schedules? Tidy their rooms and pour themselves prudent bowls of nonspecific brown cereal? Of course not.
Morgan, a feisty 9-year-old, would take command of breakfast, crafting Eggo Cinnamon Toast Waffles into sandwiches with giant scoops of vanilla ice cream. Then we’d plant ourselves on the couch to watch cartoons with our dog, Riley, poised at our feet, ready to make any evidence of our illicit activities disappear.
If Saturdays were epitomized by sugar highs, technicolor cartoons, and a trail of sticky, melted vanilla ice cream dribbled down our arms, Sundays had a gentler rhythm. My dad would slip out early to play softball or football (depending on the season), with Riley by his side. Those mornings belonged to the Kassel girls—and to Happy Face Breakfasts. My mother was decidedly not a morning person, so Sunday mornings meant she could take her time and cook us breakfast—a task typically delegated to my dad on busy school days. And she went all out.
My mother had a knack for making our family’s routine feel anything but.
The Happy Face features changed weekly, but there were a few constants: those same mini Eggo waffles became eyes, a halved strawberry the nose, and an upturned smile made of scrambled eggs. From there, the fridge was my mom’s palette: Blueberries could be “pupils” on sliced banana “whites” of the eyes, orange wedges took shape as “eyebrows,” and, if we were well behaved, a sensible squirt of canned whipped cream would adorn the top of the plate as “hair.” Every plate came to the table with my mom’s same reminder: “Eat the eggs, not just the whipped cream!” It was an Instagram-worthy dish years ahead of its time.
My mother had a knack for making our family’s routine feel anything but. Dinner wasn’t simply a piece of pan-fried cod—it was “Mommy’s Favorite Fish” (a misnomer, considering it was decidedly our preference). Back-to-school shopping trips turned into an all-out, fashion week-worthy showcase for an audience of two. And Sunday breakfast wasn’t just another meal—it was Happy Face Breakfast.
To say that food was my mom’s love language would undersell the act. She never came home empty-handed—work trips into nearby New York City would invariably result in a fluffy loaf of fresh bread or some other sweet treat appearing in the bread box (despite her own decades-long intolerance to gluten). Good report cards earned my sister and me an annual pilgrimage with her to Dylan’s Candy Bar in Manhattan.
It was a means of self-love, too. Never one to deny a “yen,” my mother was responsible for packages of Twizzlers Nibs, Good and Plenty, and Fig Newtons materializing in our snack drawer with a few pieces missing—a surefire sign that she had been struck by a nostalgic craving.
My mom died in 2020, just days before the COVID-19 lockdown, which created the uniquely bittersweet circumstances of living—and grieving—in my childhood home alongside my sister and dad, the three of us under the same roof for the longest time in more than a decade.
The act of making something familiar and comforting helped make the ordinary feel a little more extraordinary, just as my mom had done.
Nothing could speed up the grieving process, especially not in the stilted timeline of a post-COVID world. But when our social circles got smaller and our days were reduced to mundane routine, the act of making something familiar and comforting helped make the ordinary feel a little more extraordinary, just as my mom had done.
I, like so many others, found comfort in the kitchen. Yes, I baked just like everyone else, but I also cooked the specific comfort foods I hadn’t tasted in years—chicken schnitzel, worms and dirt, pot after pot of Annie’s White Cheddar Mac and Cheese. We even bought sugary cereals like Fruity Pebbles, which had been reserved for the worst of times, like when I was rejected by my top-choice college. It was like a full-on regression to kiddom. Somehow, at times, it sufficed.
I may not craft scrambled eggs smiles every Sunday anymore, but my mom’s memory and the spirit of the Happy Face Breakfast live on in so many other ways. She lives in the brownie I bring home for my boyfriend just because I happen to pass a bakery on the walk home from the subway. She lives in the nostalgic snacks my sister buys, even though she knows they’ll upset the gluten intolerance that she went on to develop.
And each time Morgan and I share a glance as we dive into that bag of Haribo gummies with wanton abandon, my mom is right there with us, too.
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