Musings of a Wench

Weeks later and I'm still affronted.

So a few weeks ago we had the Other Grandmother and mildly gropey grandfather over for dinner, along with John's parents. It was only the second time the grandparents have seen the house, the first been the month we moved in, so we had to give them the house tour, of course. Now, I'll admit it's a large house, and the 'tour' often gets derailed by games of foosball, because dude, that's way more fun than checking out the scary unused bathroom in the basement. At any rate, it may be a large house, at least by the standard of say, yuppies our age in this city. But even still, it's no mansion - it's a late 60s suburban house. Well. The tour managed to take an entire HOUR AND A HALF to go through, in part because we had to stop and explain the origin or every single bit of John's wall collections (which include sticks and similar shaped objects from his travels and another corner with coral and fish skeletons from his travel). Every. Single. Piece. Every single goddamn rock had to have it's origin explained. I kid you not. Oh, sure, they didn't ask about the dozen oil paintings my grandfather did hanging around the house, but had to be told the origin and collection history of each small shiny rock. God. SO BORING.

But fine, we eventually get to the storage room in the basement. Technically, it's an illegal basement (the window's too small) but we use it as a storage room. Other Grandma, who for the record complained about every single thing served that night - the water was from the tap, she didn't want to drink the bottled water, the cabbage salad was too spicy, there were potatoes roasted with the veggies, the chicken had skin, the meringues were much sugar, there was something wrong with the strawberries I put on top, you get the idea. Other Grandma takes one look at our storage room, a room I take a fair amount of pride in (check out the canning!) and snipes, "you cook from cans all time!" in the most rude, judgemental voice possible. (On an evening I served homemade bread, hummus made with beans from a can, cabbage carrot salad with homemade dressing, two roast chicken with roasted potatoes, celery root, and carrots, and meringue nests with strawberry mixed with sugar to form their own syrup. All this on a weeknight. Not exactly processed canned food.)





Now, look at those pictures, keeping in mind that this is the basement storage room, a repository for Costco runs of tomatoes, and giant bags of rice. Now, sure, there are a lot of canned tomatoes. Tomatoes are very bad and very expensive in February in the white north, and I am happy to use canned at those times in pasta sauce. I mean, of course! I used canned beans on weekdays for quick meals. I also have lots of dried beans for times when I have more time and energy. Again, I feel no shame in using canned beans to cook meals with. I mean, they're beans. In liquid. Not exactly Evil Processed Food, you know? There are still dozens of jars of jam we made, pickles I made, two types of relish I made, garlic jelly I made... There are multiple types of flour, and rice, and pasta. Sure, there are also some boxes of cereal (mainly used for nuts and bolts) and a fair amount of pop, but that stuff is for parties - we buy when it's on sale.

I am a good cook and I pride myself on cooking stuff from scratch. Yeah, sure, I know I don't grind my own flour or make my own vinegar, but come on. This is NOT the storage room of a packaged food eater. Hell, do those people even have giant food storage rooms? Sure, I have a weakness for those Asian noodle soup bowls, and I use canned tomatoes and I only make my own coriander chutney sometimes. The fact that I have more than one option for coriander chutney, however, is a sign that I am not what she implied of me, that old bitch. John didn't get the slur, didn't see the hostility. But trust me, it was there.

At any rate, check out my storage room. The pictures are simply covered in notes - I love that feature. As a bonus, check out the bar photo - can you guess what else John collects? *grin*

Labels: family, food, life, the boy

posted by Morgan @ 3:12 p.m.