Lauren’s Pasta Bake
“It's like the most stereotypical white people food there's ever been. It's like a casserole. We call it pasta bake. And it was just a thing I knew how to make and it was my favourite.”
Lauren’s father passed away suddenly in 2017. “It was a very stressful time,” she says. She and her husband live in the U.S. and were suddenly tasked with finding the money and means to book a last-minute flight to her native country, Australia. “We had a GoFundMe, I had to get to San Francisco to get a passport.” Due to her lack of funds, she found herself being stuck in the U.S. for longer than she’d like, all while dealing with the ramifications of her dad’s death. “I think I got to a point where I was just kind of running on fumes. There was so much to do. I think that when we talk about grief a lot of times it's like it's instantaneous, but it didn't hit me. I think that I was like, ‘I can't feel this feeling until I get home.’”
Lauren’s dad was “loud and funny and super sarcastic.” One of her favourite memories of him is when her best friend from school would come over. Her friend couldn’t understand his Australian accent “and so whenever she was over, he would lay it on as much as possible. And just say insane things to her because he knew that she would just be like, ‘great!’ He just thought that was so funny.”
In those moments of staving off grief and being isolated in a country thousands of miles away from her family, Lauren found herself in limbo, sure that she would be unable to feel any solid emotions on the situation until she was reunited with her family. “I was like, what can I do? I can't do anything, I just have to get home. We were broke. I couldn’t even afford tickets to get home. Being that far away can make you feel really, really helpless.” Therefore, she turned to something that would comfort her, and made a big batch of her favourite childhood meal, something their family simply calls ‘Pasta Bake.’ “It was like my favourite thing as a kid. I loved it. I made myself a big one and we ate it until we left because it was comforting and it's good. That’s what I did.”
Lauren was born in Australia and moved to the U.S. when she was nine. Her parents moved back to Australia at the end of 2016. “So my dad died, not even a year after they moved back home,” she said. “It's hard because, you know, I wasn't there. I hadn't seen him. The last time I saw him was when I got married, six months before he died. Which is such a happy memory to have. But it's also hard to know that I didn't see him for so long. And then the guilt comes in, and you're like, I never called him up. I never talked to him enough. All of those things.”
This pasta bake isn’t the only food that Lauren associates with her dad. “It is a really bizarre thing to think of how integral food is to some of the memories of my dad.” Lauren’s dad was of dutch heritage and moved to Australia from the Netherlands when he was a child. Dutch Liquorice was something that she and her father would share bags of when Lauren was young. “Every year inevitably around the end of August I buy Dutch licorice and eat it kind of in his honor. And then on his birthday too. To me, it’s all about the salty black liquorice.”
The Pasta Bake is simple and easy, just cook onion and bacon in a pan with some oil while boiling your pasta. “Always, always, always bow-tie pasta,” Lauren says. Then add cubed seasoned chicken (salt, pepper, and some garlic powder if you’re feeling it) to the pan. “Then you mix your sauce and you have to be really quick,” pour a can of tomato soup into the pan, and a large dollop of sour cream on top, Lauren’s dad would refer to it as ‘a good whack’ of sour cream, mixing quickly so the sour cream doesn’t curdle. Then stir in the drained pasta, transfer to an oven-safe dish and cover with “a healthy layer” of cheese. “Then you broil it in the oven so that the cheese melts on top and it is gonna make your cheese very Brown. [Which is] the best way to have it. So good. It's very good. Like I said, it's very ‘white people food’ but like oh yeah, I mean, it's good.”
Lauren says salt and vinegar chips also bring her back to memories with her dad. “ I can think about the times that I sat on the couch next to my dad and he and I shared these things. They say it about smell, but I think it's the same for taste —it can bring you immediately back to those memories.”
In this in-between moment of Lauren’s grief, she says eating that pasta bake definitely made her sad, but also “I think it helped me to actually feel the grief and the things that I was feeling, but also to remember so many of the good times.” Lauren talked fondly of her childhood — going to the mountains and museums with her family. It was clear that her family was very close when she was young, and that they spent most of their time together. “During that week before I was able to get home, I was just realizing how special it was to have a family that cared so much about each other and eating dinner together every night and having these meals and spending that time. It made me realize how fortunate I was for that and how lucky I was to have my dad even in the time that I did, even though it wasn't long enough. It was grief-inducing, but it was comforting. It felt like the very core of my dad and my relationship with him.”