Personal food heritage?

 Because I needed something mindless to watch, a few episodes of Top Chef found their way to my TV. There's something soothing about watching strangers prepare odd food, sometimes succeeding and often failing miserably.  Truly mindless.

In one episode the bossy hosts demanded that the contestants cook something from their "personal food heritage." This might be easy if you were raised in a house that had a heritage, like Italian or Southern or African or Russian. Even if you barely had such a heritage, one could probably come up with a reasonable facsimile, like a modern-day borscht or some fancy and weird take on Mississippi fried chicken. 

But this assignment made me wonder what I would cook if I had to come up with something from my "heritage."  There wasn't any heritage when I was a kid. There was barely anything resembling any sort of cuisine, let alone something that spoke of my parents' roots. Tuna-noodle casserole or hot-dog-canned-bean casserole don't really call to mind  recipes handed down generation to generation. Gray ground beef fried up and thickened with flour and water served over boiled russet potatoes isn't in any version of "Joy of Cooking."  So what would I prepare in this situation?

Honestly, I couldn't think of anything. My Mom was a pretty bad cook, but she did make good fried chicken, but it wasn't part of our heritage, it was just something she made that tasted good. She made good pies, but again, that's not a "family recipe" sort of thing. No one waxed poetic while eating a slice of apple pie.  We just ate it and were happy to have pie for dessert. My Dad grew up on a farm, a real honest-to-dirt farm, so his cooking skills stopped at eggs fried in bacon grease. 

This made me wonder what my kids would pick as a "family heritage recipe."  They had an Italian grandmother, so that would help guide the needle to an ethnic food choice. My cooking was good but it wasn't ethnic at all.  There are a few things I made when they were growing up that they actually liked, but to riff on flambeed chicken with almonds seems sad and definitely not Top Chef fare. 

In the end, the contestants all made something that had meaning to them, like deconstructed spaghetti and meatballs or a hearty soup with cabbage and cod. My dish would have to be a remake of a Swanson's frozen pot pie, one of the only things I remember getting excited about as a kid. We only got to have them a couple of times a year, when our parents went out to dinner by themselves and left us home alone. They were terrible, of course, but the idea of frozen food was so luxurious that we were all overjoyed at the prospect of eating what everyone else in America was eating on a Saturday night.  Swanson's pot pies and Swanson's TV dinners, with the four little compartments of food: main course, veggie, mashed potatoes and a teeny nub of dessert: now that was incredibly fine dining!