The goods ready for the microwave–glazed donuts with deli ham and Velveeta singles.

Action shot–cue the excitement.

Ready. Pure happiness begins now.

The Rocke kids always looked forward to one particular Sunday–the day that Mom and Dad were in charge of “serving lunch” at church.  This meant that our family was in charge of feeding about 400 people lunch, in the span of about an hour, in between morning and afternoon church.  I have no idea how the tradition started, but the “normal lunch food” consisted of a metal tray filled with a variety of donuts, usually from Casey’s, a platter of ham and cheddar cheese, and sliced white bread.  The average person would have made a sandwich and then had a donut for dessert, but somehow, our family never settled for normal or even socially acceptable.  We thought that we should skip the bread part and just layer our donuts with ham and cheese, and in a sense, kill two birds with one stone.  As if this wasn’t enough, one of us decided to microwave our concoction for a few seconds until the cheese melted–genius.  In the same way that we were green before it was cool, we created the monte cristo concept long before Bennigan’s put it on the menu.  I don’t know when we started eating donuts with toppings, but it was a normal food creation in our house, especially on the Sunday we served lunch, as we got to have it for breakfast, lunch, and all the leftovers we could ingest.

To this day, this is one of my favorite guilty pleasures.  Sometimes I forget that it’s not normal and will mention it in front of other people who crinkle their nose, act crazy, and then the challenge is on for me to make them at least try it.  At my last school, I brought a dozen donuts and meat and cheese in to the lounge and made the teachers try it.  For some reason, I decided to write about this culinary delight as part of my “About Me” poster in the hallway, and my students found it simultaneously disgusting and fascinating.  At the end of the school year, my kids threw me a surprise going away party and—you guessed it.  One student, JT, brought in the goods.  We layered up the donuts, cut them in quarters for tasting convenience and warmed up the donuts to perfection.

I like to think that I improved their culinary world that day–and allowed a Rocke tradition to be planted in the deep South.