Foodies and Why I Can't Be Bothered

Once I was a food snob.

Every weekend I would go to the Pike Place Market, shopping basket on my arm for ultimate grooviness effect and I would shop for the week. I bought meat from Don and Joe's, fresh produce from Frank's, coffee beans at Starbuck's (this was before you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a Starbuck's shop). I purchased tea at Market Spice, cheese from DiLaurenti's, milk and eggs from the Creamery and then head to Magnano's Whole Foods for bulk staples. Once home I could spend close to an hour opening brown paper packages tied up with string, pouring the contents into assorted glass jars. I reveled in my collection of beans, the varieties of rice, the five or six types of flour. In these days, when I flirted with vegetarianism (didn't take) and explored new cuisines, I learned culinary technique. I learned the patience required to turn out a good sauce or decent pie crust. I baked constantly. I wouldn't hear of using anything "processed". Everything I cooked with was fresh and in as near a natural state as I could get it. (The exception being, of course, things like coconut milk or other exotic ingredients which had to come from import shops and ethnic markets because this is ancient history and such items were not yet standard issue at Safeway). All of this seems reasonable enough on paper. But I was a snob about it. Pasta from a box? When you can make your own? Ridiculous. Tomatoes from a can? Surely you jest. There is a profound distinction between, say, a supper of Hamburger Helper with Jell-o for dessert and using the ocassional pre-packaged item to move things along. But I hadn't learned that yet.

I will always have time to cook because I make it a priority. We eat together as a family every night and that is a priority. I plan our menues around the extracurricular schedule and we still manage to sit down to home-cooked food more nights than not, whether it's a three course meal or a bowl of soup and a sandwich. Because I have the luxury of being at home, that means that the soup, more often than not, is made from scratch, but not always. If the priority is being together at table and the schedule doesn't get us there until 7, I may very well open up a tasty box o' soup from Trader Joe's. Maybe I'll swirl in something of my own devising. But either way, what I don't do is apologize for it.

Fresh ingredients are delicious and healthy. Prepared food full of additives are not. I hold to and honor this difference. But I also thank God every day that spinach comes prewashed. I realize that sometimes frozen vegetables are better than fresh, that tinned tomatoes are far superior in every way to any tomato purchased out of season and that the ocassional time-saver does not undermine either my ability to cook or my enjoyment of what I've cooked. In short, I'm over myself. Which I realized again last night as I steamed up a pre-cut melange of broccoli and cauliflower from Trader Joe's and tossed it with Hidden Valley Ranch dressing. (Shut up, it was delicious).