Food Traditions

Originally written sometime in Spring 2021

My husband took his last test of medical school on Friday. The first two years of school there are multiple tests every week - to prepare you for the many country wide standard tests - and the they get more and more important, so we never celebrated those tests, but the last two years of medical school there are only tests every four weeks when one rotation ends and another begins. We started walking to get bagels from a local bagel shop on test days about halfway through our first year of rotations, and we’ve loved it. We get a plain bagel with strawberry cream cheese, a chocolate chip bagel with strawberry cream cheese, and a new to us savory combination (that one is for me, and this time was a spinach bagel with sun dried tomato cream cheese). I read Jenny Rosenstrach’s book How to Celebrate Everything in our first year here for school, and I think of her every time we go on our bagel walks. Her work is well worth a read. My favorite recipes in this book are her gnocchi and her popovers, but even if you don’t want new recipes in your life, her book is a pleasant read that will make you think about how food helps you remember the past to live more fully in the present.