This story is from when my parents were first married. One night, my father had a craving for pork chops and asked my mother if she wanted him to make one for her, too. My mother declined, telling him that she disliked pork chops.

A while later, my mother was figuring out what she wanted to make for her own dinner when my father sat down at their table with a juicy, delicious pork chop cooked to perfection.

Mom: “What is that?!”

Dad: “A pork chop?”

Mom: “That’s not a pork chop! Pork chops look like shoe leather!”

And that was how my mother learned that the way her mother made pork chops — cooking them until they were essentially jerky — was neither the standard nor the ideal.