Back to my cooking roots (or the books that made me think)

After dinner last night I started reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything, and this morning my Kindle says I am 11 percent in. I just finished reading his chapter on the French Paradox, how the French eat so much more saturated fat that we do but still have less heart disease (and obesity, though that doesn’t seem to be mentioned). I almost kept on reading into the chapter about mashed potatoes, except the phone rang, so I had to go back and reread the last paragraph to get into my reading groove again, and then I realized that this fits right into my thoughts/quest for eating better.

We live in an age where raw vegan, gluten free, paleo, and numerous other diets are the supposed answers to weight loss and feeling better and having more energy. But we weren’t always fat and tired, and we didn’t used to have to go on diets in order to lose weight and feel better. We just ate what was available to us, taking cues from the seasons and from the culture we live in. In the last book I read, Robin Mather’s The Feast Nearby, she wrote about eating in season. She also briefly mentioned that during the time she lived in Arizona, she ate mostly the foods indigenous to the area, noting that when guests came from out of state and continued to eat the way they were used to (instead of the light meals of chips and salsa and taquitos we love so much in the Southwest), they were miserable in the Arizona heat, their bodies unable to digest such heavy foods. In the first book I read this year, Almost Amish by Nancy Sleeth, even though it ended up not being about food so much, she noted that the Amish don’t eat fast food, and they only eat what they can provide for themselves, which again means eating with the seasons and within their own culture.

So it seems that even before all my reading, even before all the undocumented research that I have done in the past (when I never thought I would find the courage to start a blog and might actually need to find those articles again), I was on the right path. I need to listen to my body, and I need to eat mindfully. This does not mean I need to count every calorie or beat myself up for wanting a cheeseburger, but if I’m going to give into my cookie craving, maybe I would be better off making those cooking from scratch, rather than buying them from the store, and maybe that burger can be made at home with better quality ingredients.

We had a night several weeks ago where we ate only bread and butter for dinner. I didn’t have my normal, over full feeling I get when I eat bread, but normally I’m eat bread with other things. And reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s chapter on baking bread last night made me suddenly crave bread. Not just bread and butter, but the smell of it in the house, the feel of the dough in my hands, the beer like smell as the bread is rising. I used to make bread all the time when I was in high school. I think my mom liked me cooking because it meant I did the cleaning too, but the bread always turned out good. The last time I attempted bread, when Rosalyn was 2, the bread did not turn out so good. It was dense and flavorless, and it scared me away from making bread again. Maybe it’s time to get over that fear, and get back to what I used to know instinctively. Fresh food is better, real food is better, and I need to stop being scared of food just for the sake of being scared.