<Begin Segment 11>

TI: And so I'm curious, when you have thirteen kids -- well, actually, back then it was fewer, but then what kind of meals did you have? What would you cook to feed so many people?

EN: It's limited. Like they used to eat a lot of rice and potatoes and eggs and things like that more. We didn't eat too much meat then. Very little meat, but...

YN: The van that used to bring the meat, she used to buy five pounds of hamburger and a big, nowadays you don't see it, the big bologna stick. Our bologna was the steak for us, actually. She'd do so many different things with that five-pounds of hamburger, can't believe how she did that.

TI: Like what would be some examples of the things she did with five pounds of hamburger?

YN: Make okazu with it, you know, put vegetables. Potato was a lot on our table. You know, breakfast, lunch and dinner, in fact. Because our father used to raise potatoes at one time. We just loved it, potatoes. Maybe that's why we're diabetic, I don't know. [Laughs]

TI: And so did your mother do all the cooking or did, was it shared?

YN: She made most of it.

EN: She did all the cooking. But my father used to buy fruits, oranges for us. He used to buy it by the boxes, because we had to have fruit every day. We used to take it to lunch. Those days, we had peanut butter, jam and orange, that's all.

YN: He'd buy a hundred pound of rice, sack of rice. They had this big bin that she'd put it in.

EN: Yeah, in that old house.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Watsonville - Santa Cruz JACL. All Rights Reserved.