From early childhood, as far back as I can remember, food has always been a spiritual and emotional experience. I’m not talking about the kind of emotional eating that therapists and weight loss programs tell you to avoid. You;re sad, so you eat. Someone yelled at you, so you eat. Someone hurt you, so you eat. Someone lied to you, so you eat. You are stressed, so you eat. I’m talking about the emotions of love and compassion with the end result being nourishment and sustenance as opposed to therapy.
Both of my grandmothers where excellent cooks. They cooked very different foods for us. My mom’s mom was of the Ukrainian school of cooking, making us perogies, sausages, cabbage rolls, borscht, wheat and creamed mushrooms. She always had a garden in the backyard…actually the entire backyard was a garden. She also had rain barrels. For some reason this makes me feel very old. Very often my parents would send my siblings and I (there were seven of us) in groups, to either of the grandparents or our aunts and uncles, for part of the summer. Being at Ukrainian grandmothers house meant we got to pick peas from the garden and spend the hot afternoons shelling them and of course, eating them. If we ate too many then we just had to shell more. Supper entailed, very often, a trip to the garden for corn on the cob, potatoes, lettuce (which she just served with homemade salad dressing and that’s it) and some rhubarb for stewed rhubarb which we ate with homemade bread. This grandma also liked to make homemade donuts. So delish. We ate off the land. No fast food here. Somebody was always bringing eggs or chickens. Grandma also made rhubarb, saskatoon berry and blueberry pies. Her food was one of my favorite things about her.
My dad’s mother, however, was much more modern. She got most of her food from the grocery store, as I recall, but she came home and magically turned it into some of the best food I’ve ever eaten. We ate things like corn pudding, roast beef, mashed potatoes and Waldorf salad at her place. Ambrosia salad. Jello. Homemade butter tarts. Shortbread cookies. Ice Cream. Brownies. Fancy desserts. Delicious vegetables served with Cheese sauce. Egg salad sandwiches. There was just something so identifiable about this grandma’s food. We watched her make it but we couldn’t figure out why it tasted better than anybody else that made that same recipe. My mom used to tell us that Grandma was always omitting a key magical ingredient when she passed her recipes on so one else could make it taste like hers.
When we arrived at either grandma’s house, there was always a plethora of delectable, homemade food just ready to be devoured by seven hungry children. My mom carried on the traditions with recipes gleaned from both grandmas. So we ended up with the best of both worlds. When you have a family of nine you are forced to become an expert on feeding them. We weren’t very picky eaters. We ate everything and I do mean everything. Rarely were there leftovers at our home. We didn’t get to eat junk food or delicacies because it costs a small fortune to feed a family this large and home cooking was more practical – budget wise. So I grew up on homemade cooking all around. I didn’t even know there were fast food joints in existence because we did not frequent them. And we rarely got to overeat – Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas being the exception – because there was only so much food.
Being the oldest daughter, mom taught me how to cook at an early age. As a teenager I was cooking for the whole family. I went grocery shopping with mom, so I knew what was involved on that end. Very often, mom was either teaching or at summer school and my chore was the cooking (and the cleaning and the ironing…wait…). I actually loved to cook. (Just didn’t like to clean up). I also learned to bake. Bake pies and cakes and cookies. I learned to make pastry and bread dough. I learned to make sauces. I learned substitutions and how different flavors worked together. I learned to can fruit. I learned how to freeze fresh produce. I learned how to cook meat. One of my favorite tasks was making stuffing for the turkey on special holidays. Getting up early to cut up the bread into cubes and fry the onions, celery and sometimes mushrooms. My usual habit was to eat it at this stage, right out of the frying pan. I always made extra so I could consume some for breakfast. The aroma was heavenly. There is just something about arriving home from school, work or wherever, to the smell of onions frying in butter. This is the kind of emotion I am talking about. That feeling of home. Of love. Of blessing. Of gratitude. Of well being. These are the emotions that food conjure up for me.
To this day, if one of us is coming home, to mommas, she makes our favorite dishes. All of them. This is her way of showing love.
As a result, cooking for my family is a privilege not a chore. Thanks to my heritage, I can cook and I love it. Its something I can do for my family that they can’t do for themselves. Yes they can fry an egg or make some toast. Heat up a pizza… get themselves a bowl of cereal….but I am the one that gets to put together the meals. And I want to do it. I love having the afternoon all to myself. Just me and my kitchen and then baking up a little bit of everything in the house. Yeah, I end up dirtying a lot of dishes, pots and pans but once everything is in the oven, fridge or freezer it is a joy to clean up the kitchen and wait for the family to arrive home from various places to the smell of home cooking.
Eating is mandatory. We eat to live. We can starve to death in forty days without food so its a base need for every human being. Feed me or I’ll die. I guess you could say I am keeping my family alive. There is something very satisfying in that. But I also like to feed them good food. Food that acts as medicine and not as poison. That involves preparing and cooking the food myself. Where I buy it is also a factor. I consider it a blessing to sustain my family with food – meals and snacks. I confess, I have had times of buying prepared food – when I first started back into the corporate world, I remember my daughter asking “Whats with the store bought cookies? Don’t you love us anymore?” My kids were so used to me baking them some favorite cookie or snack when they returned home from school each day.
For years I went to the Farmers Market in the fall and bought cases upon cases of fruit for canning. The pride I felt when I looked at my basement shelves lines with jars of peaches, pears, cherries, pickles, and salsa. Salsa. I usually got together with a friend and we chopped peppers, onions, tomatoes (with surgical gloves on) so we could simmer the tomatoey sauce on the stove for hours until the whole house smelled like an Italian restaurant. I know salsa isn’t Italian but lets not break the mood by bickering over facts.
To this day, there is something so spiritual about asking some friends over and feeding them. Sharing a meal. Breaking bread. Providing a need. The fact that someone would take the time to cook for you speaks volumes. We take food to people who are grieving. We take food to people who are stressed. We take food to people who are sick. Celebrations are lacking without food. We raise money for children and families in famished areas of the world to provide food as an act of compassion and love. To share a meal with someone is true intimacy. This is the emotional eating that I’m talking about. And I’m not going to quit emotional eating. Take that, WW police.
The Red Plaid Apron 
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