Welcome!

This is me: Carrie

And this is my Nanny (grandmother on my mother’s side):

My grandmother is 94 years old. 94! Growing up I always knew that she was old, and while the gulf of years that divides us has remained constant, the steady movement towards her centennial combined with my maturing age has made me acutely aware of exactly what that means. She was born in 1917. I am currently 27. When she was my age it was 1944; she is not only of a different generation but truly from a different time altogether.

At 27 I am currently a lot of things. I am a friend, a sister, a daughter. I am a student, a teacher, a stranger. But to one remaining living person on this planet, I am a granddaughter.

This relationship has been at the forefront of my mind recently as my Nanny ages and I think back over what I know about her life. I want to know what my grandmother’s life was like at my age. Unfortunately, at 94, her memory isn’t the best and it saddens me to think that I have likely missed the opportunity to learn more about her first hand. All I have to work with are memories; those that I have and those others can share with me. So, when this desire to know her better really took hold, I began to examine those memories.

Point? I’m getting there.

One of the things that stands out for me when I think about my grandmother is her cooking. She made potatoes that made you sad to get full. Her cake was chocolatey, moist and decadent without being overly sweet. And her bread; Dear GOD her bread. That is what stood out above all else. My grandmother’s brown bread was made from scratch, and kneaded by her own two hands with love. It was sweet and doughy, crusty on the outside and chewy on the inside. In short, it was heaven. So naturally, with this being such a prominent memory of her, I convinced her to teach me how to bake it.

I received more than just a lesson in baking that day; I gained a new appreciation for both my Nanny and the life she lived long before I ever existed. That bread came to me through a woman who routinely made her own bread, along with most things that graced her family’s dinner table. And only one generation before her, my great grandmother would have done even more cooking and baking from raw, unprocessed ingredients.

That realization perhaps only struck me at that moment a few months ago because of my own struggles with food. I have recently grown upset and disappointed with the trends I notice now in prepared and processed foods. Food is more and more becoming not only unhealthy but wholly unrecognizable. “Instant” is the hot ticket these days, from pizza to stir fry, to cookies now even pre-cream-cheesed bagels. Things that most of us know how to make (or could easily learn) but don’t take the time to.

 

That naturally led to the realization that everything, EVERYTHING that could be found in the grocery store must have, at one time, been made from scratch in people’s homes. If bread similar to that which I had learned to make now comes packaged from the bakery, than surely the other foodstuffs lining the aisles have made a similar journey from someone’s home. Assuming that, could I not learn from making those things from scratch, just has I had wanted to learn more about my grandmother by learning to make her bread?

And so that, my friends, is the very long-winded explanation for what this blog is all about: making food from scratch and reconnecting in some way to the love that initially went into it. I’m convinced that there are lessons in the process of unpackaging those foods. Be they about family, culture, health or some “unknown” remains to be seen.

Over the upcoming months I will open my kitchen to you as I attempt to make whatever I can from scratch. From the divine dinners to the disasters, you’ll get to see it all. I have a lot of high hopes not only in the skills I could potentially develop (thus making me an excellent candidate for farm-wife some day) but also for what I will learn about the greater value of food as I invest more and more of my time and energy into it. Will the ketchup I make from tomatoes and…whatever else in the stuff be “better” than what is currently sitting in my Heinz bottle? The taste? The quality? The nutrition? The satisfaction?

And so it begins!  This inaugural post will be something of an anomaly. Normally I will include recipes, photos of process, etc. But, this recipe is a family secret, so you’ll have to make due with a couple pictures of the final product.