I fully admit to being a snob is soooo many ways. I am snobbish about grammar and spelling. I typically hide Facebook posts from people who are educated yet type exclusively in text speak and with bad grammar. I own up to sometimes missing something - I type horribly on an iPad and phone, but typos and occasional misspellings do not bug me while phrases like " I done" and "we wasn't" and "I seen" make me twitchy.
Perhaps worse than language, I am a snob about cooking. I grew up in a house with a mom who worked and still had time for homemade bread almost every week. I am not even sure I knew you could buy pie crust in the freezer sections of grocery stores until I was grown. Let me say that I am not mother. I have never made cheese or yogurt after milking a cow. I have never butchered a chicken. I don't make sourdough. I don't make pickles or any of the thousand other things mom does so well. However, I do cook and if possible, I cook from scratch. If I run across a recipe that calls for a cake, pancake, or bread mix it is automatically discarded just because I don't keep those things in the house.
I have always enjoyed cooking, but several years ago, I abandoned shortcuts like canned cream soups and mixes. On one hand, I find making a cream soup starting with a roux to be magic; satisfaction swells in me as I transform something as simple as butter and flour and cream into rich, smooth, thick, bubbly sauces. I have a love affair with my stand mixer, food processor and blender, but I am happiest when my tools are an old fashioned wire whisk and wooden spoon. The simplicity of tools while making something divine appeals to me. It is amplified when I am using ingredients from our land and garden to make something for my family, but that is a different post. For now, just know that even though that wild plum jam was a mess Saturday, I loved the doing of it. An added bonus is that Bella is taking some interest in the kitchen happenings. For now, she doesn't have to learn how to make jelly or pie crust right now; it is enough that she knows these things can be made instead of just purchased.
On the other hand, over the past few years, we have been conscious of how much processed food we eat - the more I cook from basic ingredients, the less processed food we eat. Look at what is in my mixing bowl on bread day. Look at the label on a loaf of store bread - they are not the same. Salad dressing, salsa, cornbread dressing, pimento cheese salad . . . The list is never ending and has the same results. These foods are full of extra junk that I am convinced our bodies just don't need. I really do avoid products that have more than five ingredients and I buy organic when I can, though where we live, it often isn't even an option.
While I love to cook and love to make sure we eat clean, I also recognize that my family doesn't buy into this as much as I do. I also know sometimes, we just have to break the rules. I still buy Bella ice cream because she doesn't care for homemade (but I am choosy and a careful label reader). We buy mustard and mayo and sandwhich bread and so many other things. I buy chips and cheese and pasta, and sometimes, I even buy a pizza because while I love to cook and care about what we eat, I also work and exercise and have a kid and a husband and a garden. I have a life beyond the kitchen and garden.
Yes, the pancakes Bella has been consuming daily are from basic ingredients found in my cabinet and fridge and not from a box. Yes, when I made shortbread and peaches and whipped cream last night, the whipped cream started out as a carton of heavy cream in my mixing bowl. Yes, I am puzzled by what other people put in their shopping carts (at least until we are in a trip and I am buying some of those same premade packages of food, hoping no one looks in my cart or until I am neck deep in papers and handing my kid a frozen pizza for supper).
Yes, I am a hypocrit - I sometimes fall off the wagon of clean eating and whole foods, not processed
foods while at the same time wondering why my grandmother even owns pancake mix. But I am also
snobbishly pleased when good food, real food finds its way from my stove to my family mouths.
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