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Thursday, January 26th, 2012

Well, believe it or not, I just found parsnips for the first time. It is interesting how one's body reacts to certain things. I thought they were delicious when boiled and mashed with margarine. I did not realize thogh that my daughter had such a big hate for the veggies which I enjoy. While brussel sprouts are not my favourite, I will eat them. Along with those go lima beans or as the British called them, Broad Beans (and that is a story in itself which I will tell you one day.) It was the only vegetable I hated as a child. Frozen peas and carrots together do nothing for me but I like them as separate vegetables and they are among my favourites, boiled carrots especially when prepared in a certain way. Zuccinis never excite me as vegetables but as part of a medley of vegetables they are fine. I will eat them with broccoli heads for example, boiled up together. They are great as raw table veggies served with a dip because their flavour is lost in the dip and only the texture remains. I have a giant pepper squash waiting here to go in the oven at some point. I hope it is not going bad inside as I have not refrigerated it. I guess my concentration on vegetables at this point in time comes from the fact that I am a Type 2 diabetic. As a result of changes I am making in my diet, I am trying out new vegetables and they have become a bit more interesting to me as time goes by and I find new ways to prepare them. As kids, all our parents knew was to boil vegetables forever until they were cooked so it is something I still do. We ate carrot sticks and cucumbers raw but that was about it. Then the fad of raw vegetables came along and we discovered a whole new set of rules for vegetables. Then we discovered Thai food, Japanese food and a whole variety of other types of food where vegetables were only sauteed lightly or served as wraps. Food in Canada has gone through an interesting evolution in the past sixty years from the days of traditional foods we grew up with like, the occasional French Canadian cooking in Quebec and British cooking which my mother gave us. That along with Canadian Chinese food which has been around for more than a century and evolved to include a lot of sweet food to meet the Canadian taste was all that we really knew as children growing up in Montreal. Occasionally we would add a few things as we got older but our training was conditioned by those days. At age 21 I lived with a German family for a year in Calgary and with other German people I knew, came to experience that kind of cooking. Then I got to know Polish food in Toronto, Swiss German food from my sister-in-law and Indian food from lunch with my customers in the days when I worked as a spice broker. Then there were the Italian friends I got to know over the years and my taste for pasta products other than the spagetti which I had as a child expanded in many different ways. In the early 1950s frozen foods were making their mark in the world with food companies that gave you a large freezer and filled it with new products every month. We lived a lot of our childhood days out of that old Amana freezer from 1951 and it was still running out in the side porch for another 20 years or so. To us as youngsters, I was a six year old, it was a gigantic thing which just fitted into the side shed and sat there like a heavy monster waiting for us to come home from school. Mother would ask us to go hunt something down and as we would pull the heavy door open, this bright light would come forth as if it was full of shiney gold and we would find a world of frozen meats, steaks, chicken and a variety of vegetables along with cans of frozen stawberries and raspberries, ice cream and all the wonderful things we loved as children. It was a treat in itself. Then as the shelves emptied, the next shipment would arrive and we would be given the job of sorting it out and seeing that all of the things went in the right place. That was my early introduction to the frozen section at the new Dominion style grocery store in Cartierville right next to the new Dairy Queen that they built next door. I will have to look at the road map photography on Google on the computer and see if it is still there. Don't let me start talking about my favourite banana split which was my traditional birthday gift back then. Mum always took me out on my birthday for one. Today if I had one, first, I could not eat that much sweet stuff and secondly it is too sweet to begin with but as a child, there was no end to them, even on my own at the Dairy Queen. Looking back, I often wonder how I would have survived those years without ice cream, those small fruit pies that cost a dime and the cakes like Joe Louis and Mae West by name. Interesting enough, you can see the racism of an earlier time in the Joe Louis cakes most likely named because of the chocolate brown colour. Aunt Jemima pancakes and syrups fell in that same category......and ohhhhhh, such good things they all were to a kid with a sweet tooth.