There are so many things I am finding out about myself from social media. I’m not even on Facebook or Instagram but once in a blue moon, but my kids keep me in the know. I recently learned from my teenaged daughter, for example, that we are an “ingredient family.” She mentioned it casually one day, just as if she was talking about growing up during the Great Depression or surviving the Dust Bowl years. “Yeah, we never had good stuff to eat like my friends did. I grew up eating chocolate chips for dessert because, you know, we are an ingredient family.”
“An ingredient family?”
“Yeah, you know, you buy ingredients instead of food.”
I was not aware that I was a subgroup. Or an outlier. My daughter was happy to explain.
“You know you are an ingredient family, Mom, if you go to the pantry and there is nothing to eat.”
Oh my, Hannah! We live on a farm! We garden! We can! We bottle! We dehydrate! We have – count them – four freezers full of food! But until now I never fully understood that we have nothing to eat. Thank you, TikTok. The same daughter showed me a video of a mother filling her pantry with snack foods. Every shelf was tastefully filled to overflowing with premade and wrapped snacks: granola bars, applesauce squeeze bottles, chip bags, cookie packets. With manicured fingers, the mother pointed out her assorted food bins, cute snacky compartments, pour spouts for cold cereal and color-coded treat system. It seems I have been falling well below expectations. “Mom, people can’t believe that the only thing you ever bought us was fruit snacks.”
I will have you know, I have an organized, divided and upscale pantry too. I have a 5-gallon bucket of bread flour, a 5-gallon bucket of white wheat, a 5-gallon bucket of sugar, a 5-gallon bucket of rice and a 5-gallon bucket of oats. All color color-coded in food grade white. Stashed in the cupboard above the fridge, I have 5- and 10-pound bags of brown sugar, powdered sugar and chocolate chips – only semisweet though because I’ve already eaten the milk chocolate ones.
Downstairs in our old – I mean vintage – cellar, in alphabetical order, I can point with my garden-quality fingernails to applesauce, apple pie filling, black beans, pinto beans, green beans, beets, dill pickles, peaches, pears … well, you get the picture.
All this may make me sound like my grandmother, but I’m not so virtuous. I am proud to say that we have plenty of food that is not good for us. I also stock cold cereal, frozen burritos and, close your ears mother, macaroni and cheese in blue boxes. Behind the peanut butter, I have stashed two jars of Nutella. In the freezer beside our homegrown corn and raspberry jam sit eight different flavors of ice cream. I recommend the sea salt caramel truffle. But somehow, I guess, this selection isn’t premade enough. It’s not convenient enough. Apparently, I need to have food at the ready that comes in flip-top cans, squeezy bottles and zipper pouches.
It’s not that I haven’t tried to change my ways. Heaven knows there are days I’ve wanted to go down the yellow brick road of kitchen convenience. Here’s the problem: soup in a can. I love soup in a can. It’s just so darn easy; pop the top and you are done! I love it, that is, until I have to eat it. And therein lies the problem. Frozen lasagna? Please no. Pizza pockets or pockets of anything? Is this really food? And why would anyone buy a premade peanut butter sandwich? With the crusts cut off?!
It turns out, I am addicted to food made with ingredients, and my children have had to pay the price. The gravity of the situation is never more clear than in the month of September. September is also known around here as “The Month of the Great Starvation." It’s my time for heavy canning and freezing, and I simply have no time to cook. I also don’t have room for anyone else to be in the kitchen cooking either. As I wade through buckets of beets, boxes of peaches and bags of green beans, I’m literally up to my knees in food. And my children are sure they are starving.
If they are brave enough to approach me in the war zone – as I have mentioned before, I am not a happy canner, and I become terrifying when I’m surrounded by boiling water, whistling pressure cookers and overflowing pits and peels – they will sometimes ask me what they can eat.
“What can you eat? Beets! You can eat beets. Or there is a whole bucket of beans that need to be snapped. Snap them into your mouths.”
It sounds grim, but the whole summer isn’t like September. When the garden first gets popping, we are all enthusiastic. In late July or early August, we have the first of what I call “out-of-the-garden” meals. We dine on new potatoes, sometimes creamed with peas, and corn on the cob, and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers brined in vinegar. We have fresh raspberries and green beans, zucchini and yellow squash. Everything is homegrown, and we are so proud of ourselves. “This is the best time of the year,” we say around the dinner table. “Wish we could eat like this all year long.”
But by September, the kids are over it. As I’m trying to find just 1 more inch of counter space to put more clean jars on, they beg, “Mom, please! Can we have pizza or spaghetti or anything that is not a vegetable? Do you remember how you used to make chicken enchiladas? Do you even remember what an enchilada is?”
This would definitely be the time to pull out a pantry of perfection. I have something better than Doritos or Veggie Straws though. “Why don’t you guys go find some of the popcorn we grew last year, shell it off the cob and pop yourself a treat tonight?” I smile as I drop another runner of pears into boiling water. Who says I don’t know the meaning of convenience food?
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