My 98 year old great-grandmother has no idea what a blog is. She is an amazing woman who lives at home (yes, her home) with her husband (also 98) with no in-home care other than that of her daughter (my grandmother). When I was a kid I basically lived at my great-grandparents. My parents worked full-time and my great-grandparents agreed to take care of me during the day. Summers were the best because I could spend the whole day sitting under maple trees, having tea parties, and watching my great-grandmother perform what I can only describe as magic. From the perspective of a 6 year old cooking is magic. How is it possible to take two pounds of apples, some cinnamon, sugar, and other "magic" powders, stir it all up in a "cauldron" and produce some of the most delicious applesauce the world has ever seen? Applesauce doesn't come from a jar? It's made from those shiny red things? Who knew!?
Recently I was thinking about my own cooking. My mother was convinced for almost a decade that I would never be a cook. In my late teen years I managed to bungle macaroni and cheese from a box. Somewhere between the ages of ten and twenty it all clicked. For a long time I dabbled with the semi-homemade stuff. You know, the stuff that requires you to just add chicken. This was a huge step for me! Then I began cooking from scratch, or at least what I called "scratch". Then I watched the film "Food, Inc." and began to completely reconsider my concepts of food. Michael Pollan, a contributor to the film, is also a well known author. I picked up his books "Food Rules" and "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto". In both he talks about not eating foods with ingredients your grandmother wouldn't recognize. This of course made me think about my own grandmothers and the foods they used to prepare for me. Would they recognize the things that I call food?
The answer was, of course, not really. So one of my New Year's resolutions was to prepare foods that my grandmothers would consider food. Fortunately, it hasn't stopped there. I began thinking fondly of the foods they used to cook: homemade fresh bread that made the house smell of warm buttery yeast and flour, broccoli cheese soup that was so creamy and rich that a 6 yr old didn't care that there was broccoli in it, and homemade pizza pies that were crunchy and so heavily topped with fresh sausage you could hardly pick it up.
Now I don't have children, but if I did I would want them to eat these foods. My grandmothers have never heard of riboflavin-flavored polyunsaturated anything. Why am I eating these things? I don't even know what a riboflavin is, and I'm also pretty sure I don't want to. I'm also pretty sure that my great-grandmother would tell me I shouldn't.
So on this blog you will find recipes and foods that I love, and that I believe my 98 year old great-grandmother, Alice, would eat and maybe even serve. Of course my tastes are a bit more eclectic that my English-French grandmother's. She doesn't know what Pad Thai and Osso Bucco are, but as long as food has fresh ingredients and smells good, I'm pretty sure she would give it a try!
