In My Mother's Kitchen: Prelude
Over the years, a really substantial amount of this journal has talked about food. I've talked about attending and hosting Supper Club. I tracked my restaurant habits for 2015, all my eating habits for 2019 and some of them for 2020. I've posted three different tags worth of recipes and cooking errata, and I've dallied in cheese, cider and burgers. I've eaten in cleveland, chicago and assorted other places. I've also touched on related topics like my food related resolutions and my health. In short, it's fair to say that I spend a lot of time thinking about food.
While many of my friends are like this, I also know a lot of people who don't really care what they eat, or who treat food solely as fuel, or who eat the same meals at the same restaurants over and over again. I know many more who pay little attention to nutrition until they have to. How exactly did I end up this way? Given that both my sister (the rarely posting tigerlily_blue) and I are much the same, the answer would seem to point back one generation at our parents, and indeed, my parents love food. While any parent will tell you that there's no guarantee your kids will like the same things you do, in this case my parents laid a strong foundation for valuing the experience of eating food.
As I've written, we rarely ate out when I was growing up. This was in large part because we had a sit down family dinner basically every night, which was possible because my family was in a position where she got to choose not to work outside the house until I was in junior high, when she opted to work a few nights a week at the library. My sister and I grew up going to multiple grocery stores every week and knowing that dinner was on the table right around 5:30pm pretty much every weeknight.
Mom was and is a great cook. The total range of dishes she cooked for dinner regularly was not as large as what I prepare now, but then I don't have to feed two kids who occasionally have picky tendencies - or more often than occasionally for my sister. I compiled a list of the meals that my mother routinely made. My sister pointed out a few that I missed. It's a long list, so we'll talk about main dishes, some desserts, some breakfasts and a lot of freshly baked bread. We'll touch on the relatively few prepared foods my mother used and talk about the garden and the fruit trees that contributed to the table. I may post some recipes, but really it's an excuse to dig into some memories. Come with me to rural 1980s North Dakota. Come with me to my mother's kitchen.
While many of my friends are like this, I also know a lot of people who don't really care what they eat, or who treat food solely as fuel, or who eat the same meals at the same restaurants over and over again. I know many more who pay little attention to nutrition until they have to. How exactly did I end up this way? Given that both my sister (the rarely posting tigerlily_blue) and I are much the same, the answer would seem to point back one generation at our parents, and indeed, my parents love food. While any parent will tell you that there's no guarantee your kids will like the same things you do, in this case my parents laid a strong foundation for valuing the experience of eating food.
As I've written, we rarely ate out when I was growing up. This was in large part because we had a sit down family dinner basically every night, which was possible because my family was in a position where she got to choose not to work outside the house until I was in junior high, when she opted to work a few nights a week at the library. My sister and I grew up going to multiple grocery stores every week and knowing that dinner was on the table right around 5:30pm pretty much every weeknight.
Mom was and is a great cook. The total range of dishes she cooked for dinner regularly was not as large as what I prepare now, but then I don't have to feed two kids who occasionally have picky tendencies - or more often than occasionally for my sister. I compiled a list of the meals that my mother routinely made. My sister pointed out a few that I missed. It's a long list, so we'll talk about main dishes, some desserts, some breakfasts and a lot of freshly baked bread. We'll touch on the relatively few prepared foods my mother used and talk about the garden and the fruit trees that contributed to the table. I may post some recipes, but really it's an excuse to dig into some memories. Come with me to rural 1980s North Dakota. Come with me to my mother's kitchen.