Honestly, yummy

Added: Mon Apr 14th 8:25pm
Posted in: Cooking

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IrongeezelleSays™ “Honestly, yummy”

By Tatjana Eggink

Since I was a small child, food has played a dominant part of my life. My family – parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins – would gather for lunch, the biggest meal in a European family in my youth. We ate home-made meals, cooked from scratch.

We would forage in the woods for wild mushrooms in the fall and blueberries, raspberries and blackberries in the summer. Everyone had a small garden, in which we grew vegetables and herbs. What we did not grow ourselves, we would find at a local farmers, such as the fresh milk, unpasteurized, that my grandmother had me drink every day. And yes, I am here to tell the tale, although to this day, I am not too fond of milk, but that milk gave me a great start to bone health –that’s another story, though. The point is that we ate real food…delicious food, in season, prepared with real butter, real oil, even goose fat. All authentic.  No additives. No preservatives. No better living through synthetic chemistry.

That’s why, when I occasionally roam the supermarket, which I do as a “sport” of sorts to read labels, to find new products, to understand how food is marketed to attract our attention, and to check on prices, I am usually dismayed. There is so much in food that does not belong – at least, to someone like myself, who has the tastes of yesterday imprinted on her palate. I do know for a fact that the cooks in my life never had high fructose corn syrup in their Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. The pantry had sugar – yep, sugar, the real stuff. As a kid that meant, if we needed a ‘power bar’ snack mid-morning, grandma would make us a dark whole grain piece of bread with a smidgen of real, sweet butter sprinkled with sugar. Delicious. Nourishing. Powerful, yet simple. My husband recalls as his sweet treat, shredded wheat with honey.
To this day, he and I call this “honest food.”  The point is, if we can pronounce the name of the ingredient in a processed food (after all, in its pure definition, shredded wheat and sugar are processed foods), we buy it, unless there is a whole paragraph of ingredients listed – then, the food, to us, ceases to be honest. Yes, I would go so far as to say that it is dishonest. It may be convenient. It may be fast. It may be filling. But don’t tell me that the product is like something that my Grandmother would make, despite its farm setting packaging that may appeal to my eyes but does not fool my palate. None of my grannies nor any Italian Nanas I have known add soy to their pasta sauce. That’s because they did not cheat – they did it for love, not profit: they put heart and soul into their cooking and I hope we all aspire to that in our relationship with one of our greatest human pleasures, food.
Tell us about your favorite “real food” or a favorite food memory: www.irongeezelle.com or www.irongeezer.com