Elote Nachos

My mother ran a daycare out of our house when I was a preteen, and one of the perks of this was that the kids’ post-lunch, pre–guardian pickup snack time always lined up with when I got home from school. I’d walk through the door to the sounds of The Nightmare Before Christmas being played for the 11-millionth time, I’d kick my 30-pound JanSport® backpack to the corner and I’d sit down on a stool at the kitchen counter. Something was always coming out of the oven. Well, almost always. One particular day, I took longer to get home because my friend Julianne ditched me to go play Nintendo® at Stasia’s and it took me 30 minutes to figure it out. By the time I got there, all the kids were in their snack-induced coma naps and my mom was cleaning up the nachos that she’d baked. There were none left. I wanted nachos. I wanted nachos so bad.

“Can you make me some more?” I asked, really dialing up the pity of being left behind twice. “I just finished cleaning, but YOU can make some,” Mom said. Could I? I guess I could. There wasn’t much to them. What we called nachos were really just tortilla chips with Cheddar cheese. She preheated the oven before leaving me to my own devices, and I went to get all two of my ingredients. I didn’t really know how much cheese to grate, so I just did the whole block and piled everything on a sheet pan cause that’s what she usually did. “You grated ALL the cheese? You better eat all of those. I don’t want anything going to waste.” So, I ate half the pan because that’s what I wanted. And I ate the other half because I didn’t want my mom to yell at me for being wasteful. I felt like garbage, which doubled later on when I was expected to show up at the dinner table.

A few years ago, fresh into my recovery, my nacho craving crept up on me. But I also wanted elote, so I combined the two. When the nachos came out of the oven, I heard my mother’s voice. “You better eat all of those. I don’t want anything to go to waste.” Eating an entire sheet pan of nachos was not a good idea for me. In fact, it was a fast track to Trigger Town. The fact that I had the self-awareness to notice that was new. Would this self-awareness transfer while I was eating? I wasn’t sure. But I sat in my body. And I ate from there. And when it was time to stop, I did. Not too full. No longer hungry. I packaged the leftovers in an airtight container, put them in the fridge and the next morning, I threw them in a skillet with some whisked eggs and had breakfast with my husband. Two birds. One stone. And a simple alternative to something that had never been easy.