Searching

First, let me start off by saying this: I have spent a long time in my adult life thinking that I have no real interests. Or rather, no really interesting interests. I have always felt sort of average in this respect. I mean, I LIKE things, but other people seemed to be way more knowledgeable and passionate about all this important STUFF. My husband, for example, loves many, many incredibly interesting things, like history and genealogy and technology and robotics and programming and geocaching and electronics. He researches, and solders, and programs, and comes home with travel bugs and is just so darn covered up in hobbies it makes me fume with jealousy. How can he be so INTERESTED in STUFF and I'm just not? Recently, we had a son, and I was sort of shocked to learn that a section in his baby book was set aside just for parental hobbies. That section is still blank for me. I had no idea what to write down.

Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in my job, which is teaching 6th grade. I want to know how to do my job better. And I'm definitely passionate about my son, who is precious and amazing and just so darn cute. But all of that is sort of generic. Doesn't EVERY teacher want to know how to do her job better, and doesn't EVERY mother just LOVE her own child. I've also labored under the assumption that everyone is equally interested in food and eating. But they're not. I mean, I think everyone is interested in not being hungry, but a lot of folks are just as happy with a frozen pizza as they would be with a fresh basil and tomato pizza with pesto and fresh mozzerella . Me, I am really tuned into what tastes really good- fresh, home-made, local. Not that I'm always successful at eating fresh, home-made or local, but I do appreciate those qualities.

I'm almost sort of embarrassed to list that as an interest. FOOD? EATING? It feels incredibly taboo to say it. In our health obsessed country, saying someone "likes to eat" is basically just a nicer way of saying they are a big mamma jamma. If I could place it on a continuum, I would say that "likes to eat" is on the bad end, with "watching TV" and "growing plaque in my arteries" while "likes to run marathons after competing in the iron man" is on the completely moral end of the line. But, if I am to be completely honest with myself, I am interested in food. Very interested. So interested, I plan to write about it. Hopefully a lot.

I grew up in Alabama, and for a long time I felt very deeply Southern. I am very much still in love with the deep South, even the heat. However, growing up, my family relied a lot on convenience cooking, and later we did a lot of low-fat dieting. Most of our eating was very modern, and had little to do with how my grandmothers and great grandmothers fed their families. While this kind of diet allowed for me, on the one hand, to be a very adventurous eater (dieting encourages you to try all sort of exotic fruits and veggies) and, on the other hand, probably allowed my mom to keep her sanity, I do feel a little disconnected from what I've termed my culinary roots- I know know very little about what my family has been eating for 100's of years. A lot of other people, whether they know it or not, are extremely connected to their histories simply by what they choose to cook and eat. I don't think I have that connection, and I would like to.

So, I'm setting out to try to learn a little bit more about my history through what was cooked where I'm from. I plan to try some old recipes from the midwest from my grandmother's cookbooks, and to try to learn from my Dad what the Alabama side of the family noshed on back in the day. Also, I'll probably add in some of my opinions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I'm just excited to try and start learning a little bit about my family history through our cuisine. And I believe that's what this blog is about.