By PAT WICK

Contributing writer

During this past month, I’ve been graced with the presence of my daughter and grandson. It was such a wealth of time to have them visiting from far off California for so long. I thought they would be here for 21 days — yes, we count the days so that we treasure each one and accomplish all the things we wish to do while they are with us.

On about day 12, my daughter was fiddling with her calendar and I saw the date of her departure from Wichita written there on August 17.

“Did you write that in wrong?” I asked. “I thought you were leaving on the 11th.”

She grinned and said, “It was supposed to be a surprise for your birthday (which was Aug. 16). Just about the time you would start thinking there was only a day or two left, we’d surprise you and tell you we had another whole week.”

However, it worked out; it was delightful to have them here for so long.

Perhaps, when you live around your children, you take these familial encounters for granted. When I, too, lived in California, only a few miles from my daughter, our time together was not so purposeful. However, with thousands of miles separating us, every moment must be relished.

Coming to Grandma’s house was always an adventure when I was a child — even those few years when I lived just down the road. When I was 6, we moved farther away so those homecomings were like family reunions. It seemed at these family occasions that food was a common denominator, which bound us together.

“Make kasenoodle,” we’d say to Grandma Ehrhardt, remembering our favorite German dishes.

Fried chicken and mashed potatoes were standard fare, so we didn’t have to beg for those. Cherry pie was everyone’s favorite dessert. If we were lucky, we might have homemade ice cream.

“Homemade noodle soup with butter balls,” we’d say to my mother when we’d come home on vacation.

This, too, was a dish carried down from a previous generation. Mom created her own twist, because now the family was vegetarian, so her triumph was to make noodle soup without chicken that tasted just as good as if a hen had jumped through the broth.

When my daughter came home, we carried forward this tradition of naming favorite foods and putting them on the menu — some we hadn’t cooked for months. What fun it was to have her remember Cherokee casserole, something I hadn’t cooked in years, which was a family favorite during a certain period.

Do you notice this in your family? A certain dish will be fixed over and over for a while and then you discover something equally delicious and you are onto a new cooking phase?

“Marco Polo spaghetti,” Jana reminded me. “We should have that.”

Oh, oops, our current spaghetti phase is garden spaghetti with freshly cubed tomatoes, freshly chopped basil, and jalapeno peppers, lightly sautéed with crumbled feta cheese and tossed through freshly cooked noodles. It tops anything from the past.

“I want rice,” says my little grandson, “rice and noodles.”

I look at this 3-year-old who looks like a china-doll replica of his daddy, and laugh. We’re fixing mashed potatoes, a delicacy honed through generations of butter dollops, sour cream, and proper cooking and this offspring of mine wants rice?

It’s another day in the country and a tad unsettling. I comfort myself in the knowledge that his tastes are just now forming and maybe someday, when he’s a teenager, he’ll come to Grandma’s house and call out for garden spaghetti, mashed potatoes, and gravy, or noodle soup — my familiar comfort foods.

For now, I’ll be cooking rice.