In the beginning. . .

It must be said that I was not raised in such a way to distrust the industrial food system, on the contrary, I have only lived in a world where the industrial food system has dominated every choice I ever made about food. I grew up in the midwest with fast food a-plenty and meat and potatoes on the menu almost every night. Occasionally there was an iceberg lettuce salad with lots of ranch dressing on the side with whatever canned vegetable was heated up to go with it. This may be a tad aggrandized - we did eat pasta and my mother had a few things that she cooked mainly from scratch that were wonderful - but on the whole we ate what I now know to be a horribly deficient and possible poisonous diet.  I don't blame my family or anyone in particular for this state of affairs - it was all we knew. I had two working parents that each had busy jobs and quick easy dinners were always welcomed and as a kid I thought it was pretty darn good. My mother and father deserve credit with instilling the nightly sit down dinner into my regimen and for this they should be applauded - too many families these days use their vehicles as the communal dining table.

You may be asking yourself why am I condemning such eating habits and what on earth do I propose to do differently.  Well my journey started very slowly and I did not come to these conclusions quickly or lightly. 

My journey actually began when I started to feel a tad affronted with my new husband who kept comparing me to his mother who was this masterful cook and always supplied her five growing children with wonderful and diverse homemade food every night (for further reference every time I mention "homemade" it is to mean from scratch with non-processed ingredients).  Eating the way I had, growing up, I was having a hard time with the criticism and I felt somewhat defensive of my midwestern lifestyle.   My husband and I also, at the time, lived in a studio apartment in Washington DC and my kitchen had a total two linear feet of counter top and a 20" oven - I wasn't really sure how he thought I could create culinary masterpieces in a 15 square foot kitchen!  But being the competitive person that I am I took it as my own personal challenge to cook things for my husband that he could eventually admit were at least equal to his mothers.  My eventual conclusion to all this was that it didn't take a ton of kitchen gadgets, space or previous experience to turn myself into a better cook.  What it did take was spending more on fresher and better ingredients and practice!