EAT REAL

Fry, Baby, Fry

I am obsessed with food.  Not in a weird food fetish kind of way, but in a “yeah, I really like food” way.  I love to shop for it, prepare it, eat it, look up recipes for it, completely alter said recipes for it, etc.  So why is food suddenly starting to freak me out?

I’ve had my share of relationships with the “in” diets.  In college I avoided anything with any fat whatsoever in an attempt to dodge the dreaded freshman 15.  It found me anyway as it should have since I needed those 15 pounds at that point in my life.  

In my second year of law school I was obsessive about Sugar Busters, the forerunner to Adkins, South Beach, any other low carb diet out there. 

See, I had gained several pounds in the early stages of my relationship with Wes.  He liked the fact that I knew how to bread and fry pretty much anything you put in front of me.  A skill that had gone unappreciated by everyone I had dated until that point.  He still credits his undying love for me to two things:  1.  I made him fried quail, grits, gravy and Italian Cream Cake for his birthday our first year together, and 2.  he thought I could get Master’s badges every year.  I may have overstated my ability on the latter, but I can still fry (and make gravy—which, by the by, is a dying art).

My frying skills, like nearly all of my cooking acumen, is the direct result of the women in my life.  I watched my grandmother (Nanny) cook for a small army nearly everyday of my childhood.  That’s necessary on a dairy farm where the help and hands must be fed well in order to get back out there and do it all again that afternoon.  She made biscuits by the dozen.  We had them at every meal.  It is my not-so-secret shame that I am incapable of making a decent biscuit.  Luckily White Lily freezes theirs. 

Anyway, she fried chicken and pork chops and cubed steak (aka "country fried steak"...I don't know what "chicken fried steak" is, the only thing that should be "chicken" fried is chicken).  She made gravy for all of those.  She roasted turkeys and beef roasts.  She boiled vegetables with slabs of fat back in them.  Most of those vegetables came from the decent sized garden that ran along the side of my grandparents’ house.  We were expected to work in that garden.  Scooting along rows of beans, getting red dirt up our seersucker shorts and between our tan toes (no sunscreen in 1980 folks), picking until our arms were scraped and sweat was caked in our ponytails.  

If you wanted to eat it you better help put it up.  That’s why I claimed to loathe butter beans until I was 20.  Have you ever shelled a butter bean?  It takes your thumbs a month to recover.  Green beans were easier.  I’ve always loved those.  And tomatoes…when society finally recognizes cross species marriages, me and my Better Boy will be first in line.  Our love is real. 

My mother was no slouch in the kitchen either.  She was more likely to use something out of box for dinner (Nanny would certainly use a boxed cake mix—it was her icings that were a thing of beauty) because she worked and we needed to eat.  We often had Old El Paso Tacos or Chef Boyardee Pizza on Friday nights.  The sitter could make them and they sure as heck didn’t deliver to the boondocks where we lived.  I’m not sure they even had pizza delivery then.  But she also made a delicious lasagna that I requested every year on my birthday, ironic as she hates Italian food.  I have wonderful dreams that involve my mom’s vegetable soup.  Sort of like the biscuits, I haven’t mastered that either, but I think it’s because I don’t hold my mouth right.  I really don’t like creamed corn, but hers is divine.  I could bathe in it. 

When my stepmom entered the picture, she had a tough row to hoe.  Two girls.  Ages 9 and 2.  Not particularly enamored with the idea of this outsider living with Daddy (who can’t cook anything but this weird kielbasa, pepper, onion and egg noodle dish-I loved it by the way).  She wasn’t really a cook either.  I’m not sure if she didn’t know that all vegetables were supposed to have fat back in them and be salted and cooked to within an inch of their lives or if she was on the front end of the health craze.  Either way, it took her some time and a crash course in the miracles of butter to figure it out.  But she did.

She used cookbooks, something that had been rare in my upbringing where you just mixed things in until it “looked right.”  She got proficient and she started making some great food, saving our favorites for when we came on the weekends.  I still make a version of her Chicken Parmesan and a Chicken Stir Fry.  Those were things we didn’t get at the dairy, but we loved them anyway.  

So here’s what I learned:  it’s best to eat what you’ve got on hand.  Fresh vegetables and raw unpasteurized milk (hey, we lived on a dairy) are the best things the good Lord gave us.  Feeding your kids things they’ll eat is a good way to sneak in things they won’t and get them to love those too.  When in doubt grab a recipe and start experimenting.

I also learned that the best cakes are made with Swann’s Cake Flour or sometimes a Duncan Hines cake mix.  White Lily produces the best biscuits.  There’s nothing wrong with throwing a jar of canned tomato sauce into your crushed tomatoes to up the flavor.  Potatoes are delicious, especially when there’s a pound of butter in them.  Homemade piecrusts rock, but the frozen ones will do.  Pork fat is our friend.  And most of all, we cook because we love the people we’re cooking for, even if that person is ourselves.

Today I know that unpasteurized milk is risky at best.  I wouldn’t give that to my children, although I’ve been known to sneak a gallon of non-homogenized home and shake the crap out of it before Wes opens it.  I know too much white flour and pasta isn’t a good thing no matter how delicious it is.  Butter is best in moderation (sigh) because I don’t do physical labor on a dairy farm all day burning off 2000 calories in the process.  And grocery stores rarely carry fat back and if they do they call it salt pork or hog jowl or something else that is wholly inaccurate.  Bacon sometimes has to stand in (grrrrr). 

But I also know that none of those things will kill you.  Neither will refined oils.  I doubt that sugar substitutes are going to set off the next global health care crises.  My green beans taste better with a little fat.  You can deny it all you want, but that’s truth right there.  White pasta, especially the kind I make myself because I do that sort of weird crap, is better than whole wheat.  If you disagree, you are either lying or your taste buds have been scoured off by that god-awful whole wheat pasta you’ve been eating.  Fried chicken is divine and it’s a treat.  And, some days, my kids are going to eat tacos or macaroni and cheese or rice out of a box, because Mama got stuck at work and forgot to plan for dinner.  They’ll live.  And, much to my dismay, they will love it.

So, what’s a girl to do in this era where we are bombarded to eat “clean”, eat “like a caveman”, eat “raw”, eat “like no other generation has done before in modern history eschewing all convenience in the name of purity and at the sake of our sanity”?  This girl is going to stop.  I know what’s healthy.  I know what’s not.  I know what moderation is.  I know when it’s ok to splurge.  My kids are going to eat like I did.  Someone is going to cook for them.  Expect them to sit at the table and say grace.  Expect them to eat a little of EVERYTHING on their plate.  And then, on special nights, like Tuesday, let them have ice cream. 

No more agonizing over whether I’m doing what’s best.  I know what’s best because I had the best teachers.  My kids are going to love good food because their best memories are going to be enveloped by the food they ate when we made those memories.  See, we make the food.  The food doesn't make us.  We’re going to EAT REAL.