Postcards from the Trail

Have you ever thought about what you eat today compared with what you ate growing up? I do. I'm a child of the '50s - you know those times? Exciting new food came from the latest box or packaged food. Processed and packaged food were what successful homemaker served her family. It was the time of TV Dinners and those crazy aluminum fold-up TV tables. I've been thinking about what I eat today compared with what my mother served when I was growing up. It is so different. Some of it was what my mother chose to serve and some of it was because I was a fussy eater. I thought I'd would write a couple of posts about how my diet has changed from what I ate when I was growing up to what I eat today.

Milk - I did not drink milk when I was growing up. Or eat cheese. Or butter.In fact I ate very few milk products or savory dishes made with milk products. I'm not certain how it started but I remember growing up 'allergic' to milk. I'm not certain why but my parents always told me I was allergic to milk. I think I had a reaction when I was being bottle fed as a baby and the doctor told my mother I was allergic to milk.She switched me to formula and that started my milk-free childhood.

My dad also did not drink milk or eat cheese. So it became a thing in our house not drink milk. Cheese was avoided. My dad would always be concerned when we went out or ate at a relatives house. "It doesn't have cheese in it?" he would always ask. We did eat a few cream sauces especially creamed onions. We always had creamed onions when we had baked ham.

But we did not have any problems eating milk based sweets. My mother loved to make homemade milkshakes when she got her first Oster blender. There was nothing better late on a hot summer night than having a homemade milkshake made with vanilla ice cream, Hershey's chocolate syrup and cold whole milk. Whip that up in the blender, pour it in a tall glass and then float another scoop of ice cream on the top.

My mother also made fresh whipped cream as topping for cakes and pies. It was a favorite at Thanksgiving. We never had that funny whipping cream that squirted out of a can or the fake greasy Cool Whip. She would whip a pint with a couple of spoons of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla. I always got to lick the beaters which were the best part of making whipping cream.

But we ate fake butter. We had margarine on the table instead of butter. Parkay was our brand. My uncle's family used butter and we thought it tasted funny. I won't touch margarine today.

Slowly I learned to drink milk and eat cheese a big part to the introduction of ethnic food when I was a teenager. Pizza became the rage in high school and my best friend had a killer recipe for cheesy enchiladas. Next came cheesecake. But it still took many years until I started to eat yogurt and other types of cheese beyond cheddar and Monterey Jack.

Now I love cheese, yogurt and butter. I rarely drink milk but I love to cook with it - cream sauces and soups. Today, my refrigerator typically has 3 or 4 types of cheese. Many of these are cheese I never saw or even knew existed when I was growing up.

Did you eat cheese and drink milk growing up?

Dinner meals I ate growing up centered around meat. Each meal consisted of four items - a meat entree, a starch which was typically potato, a vegetable and a salad. I can not remember a meal where we did not have some type of meat or fish. The meat of choice was predominantly beef.

We shopped mostly at our local grocery store. It was 3 blocks away. It had a butcher shop and none of the meat was pre-wrapped. The butcher became a friend. You would order by the pound or point out a specific piece that you wanted to buy. He would weigh it, wrap it in white butcher paper and write the price with a black grease pencil. Hamburger was purchased by the cut - ground chuck or ground round. Chuck had more fat but was much more flavorful - and cheaper.

My mother made a wide variety of beef dishes. We would have the occasional steak night - mostly rib eye cut but occasionally New York or a sirloin. We did not eat round steak very often because my mother felt it was too tough. Sometimes she would take a chuck or other less expensive cut of beef and pound it with the edge of a saucer, flour it and fry it for chicken fried steak. Large chuck roasts became pot roasts - braised and slow cooked in the oven.

We also had different types of casseroles especially when it became popular to make them with a can of mushroom soup. She would flour and fry pieces of meat and then cover them with Campbell soup thinned with some beef broth and bake. Or make fry some meatballs and cover them in mushroom soup for 'Swedish Meatballs'. These were great over noodles. Another favorite was to take a flank steak, cover with stuffing, roll up and bake. Meatloaf was made with Wheaties cereal. It was one of my Dad's favorites. Ground beef also made it into spaghetti sauce. We always had corned beef on St. Patrick's Day.

My sister lived with us in the mid-60's. Her husband was in the Navy on a ship in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War. Her and her family lived in our remodeled basement which had a full kitchen and three bedrooms. She would shop at the commissary and get great deals on meat. The roasts she could get on the base were wonderful.

Pork chops and ham were popular in our house. Ham was almost always the one that came out of a can surrounded with gelatin although occasionally we did have a lovely bone-in ham roast. We also loved lamb. Chicken was mostly fried. I loved the drumsticks.

Probably one of the weirdest meals that I loved was creamed chipped beef. I completely forgot about it. You could buy the dried beef slices in a glass jar with a top that you had to remove with a bottle opener. We would save the glass jars and use them as juice glasses. The dried beef was usually very salty. My mother would make a milk sauce and then add the rinsed beef slices. I used to love the salty creamy taste. My parents would eat it on toast but I loved mixing peas in with the cream sauce.

Today - I rarely cook this style of meal. G has been vegetarian for over 15 years. I will occasionally cook beef or chicken for myself if I get the craving for meat. When the fall days shorten and the air gets cooler, the craving get stronger. There is something warm and comforting about a lovely stew or pot roast cooking on the stove. Okay... I'm getting hungry now.

Related Posts:

Confession of a Fuzzy Eater - Milk

The seasons are changing. We are moving into Fall and I have started cooking fall themed meals. I picked up some broccoli this week and smiled when I remembered this was a vegetable I detested when I was growing up.

I was so fussy with the vegetables that I would eat when I was growing up. My earliest memories are of nothing but canned. Yes, that is right - we ate mainly canned vegetables. Our house was build around 1920 and we had built in cabinets in the kitchen. These were stocked with canned food. It was a quartet of 4 main vegetables; peas, corn, green beans, and carrots. Peas were pretty straightforward but the canned corn came in a wide variation of styles. Yellow, White which was called shoepeg, creamed and mexi-corn. Creamed was one of our favorites. I have no idea exactly how it was made but I suspect it was really crushed corn and no cream was to be found. I remember visiting one of my aunts one summer in Oregon and she served real creamed corn and I was amazed. We all lapped it up. Here is a recipe from Mark Bitten for real creamed corn.

Green beans were usually cut or french style green beans. I loved the french style green beans. Sometimes my mother would cook up some bacon and combine it with the green beans. Canned carrots were pretty straightforward. I remember they later introduced 'crinkle cut' carrots but it really wasn't anything different from the standard sliced carrots.

It was in the mid-60's that our family discovered frozen vegetable. Wow - what a change from the mushy salty canned vegetables. Peas were so different and frozen peas quickly came a favorite over canned. We also really liked the Birds Eye rice dishes. They had these different frozen rice dishes in pouches that you would boil and serve. They were very tasty. We eventually moved mostly to frozen vegetables.

But we rarely ate fresh vegetables beyond lettuce. I know a lot had to do with my refusing to eat other types of vegetables. My mother would cook asparagus, zucchini, broccoli and cauliflower but I refused to eat them. They were mostly boiled but a few she would cook up in a sauce with cheese - I still wouldn't eat them. It was a shame because I grew up near the best location for fresh asparagus. Every spring my parents friends and neighbors would bring crates of beautiful fresh asparagus. My parents would eat it boiled up and served with a dollop of mayonnaise. I hated it - or thought I did. My mother would even blanche it and freeze it so she would have it later in the season. Today I will love to get a crate of fresh asparagus from the California central valley,

Corn on the cob was one vegetable that we ate fresh. I loved it and ate lots in the summer. It was very inexpensive in the central valley of California and had it at least once a week. We also occasionally had fresh carrots. There was one different vegetable that I would eat - turnips! My mother would peel, slice and boil them. I love turnips - even raw. I especially love them boiled with slabs of butter or in a beef stew. I rarely eat them now. I need to put them on my grocery list because they are a great vegetable for fall and winter.

When I married G, I learned that he mostly ate salads. He occasionally ate similar canned vegetables but nothing different. But one day, he brought home some broccoli from a botany class and wanted me to cook it. Eek! I had no idea what to do. I think I boiled it and we both discovered it wasn't that bad. Soon we were having broccoli.

Now, we love most vegetables. I discovered fresh green beans in college and sugar snap peas when we started our first vegetable garden. I have rarely purchased canned vegetables in the past 20 years. Majority is always fresh and if possible purchased from local farmers.

There are a few that I still struggle eating. I don't like cooked leaf vegetables - spinach, swiss chard, kale. G likes them but I still just gag....