Welcome to the very last Moth podcast of 2020. I'm your host this week, Kate Tellers.

It's been an extraordinary year, and for many of us, that's meant shaking up our holiday

traditions, gathering with loved ones around a computer instead of a table. In our house,

we're missing cousins, siblings, grandparents, neighbors, friends, and the chance to do what

we love the most, feed them. In honor of that, which we cannot consume together, that

nourishes us in so many ways, this episode is dedicated to food. First up is Annie Shere.

Annie told this story at a Chicago Story Slam where the theme of the night was flawed. Here's

Annie live at the Moth.

My childhood kitchen was home to two gigantic blue plastic mixing bowls, neither of which

were used for baking. The darker blue bowl was used exclusively for deciding where we were

going to eat out for dinner that night. No one in my family was very invested in cooking,

unless you counted, reheating a rotisserie chicken from cub foods, which has its time

in place. And so this was a frequent occurrence in the Shere household. We would each cast our

vote into the big bowl. My brothers for Old Country Buffet, myself a Dave and Buster's

loyalist, my parents praying to go anywhere else. And then one restaurant would be randomly

selected from the bowl, and that's where we'd go out for dinner. Or more likely, we would

fight about it for the next 45 minutes and settle on somewhere. No one wanted to go.

Usually Applebee's. Very democratic. There was only one exception to this genetic picky

eater-ness, and that was a dessert we could all agree on was simply unparalleled. And

that was our grandma Becky's Bunt Cake. Grandma Becky's Bunt Cake can only be described

as a love child between chocolate streusel and god herself. And indulgent, buttery, marble

ring, generously dusted with powdered sugar so that when you took your first bite, your

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