Cooking with Ingredients

When my husband and I were first married and both pursuing graduate studies, I adopted his eating style that he charmed me with during our engagement:  hamburger, cheese, instant rice and Ramen noodles were the key ingredients.  It was good food, but when we were invited to dine at the home of a professor for whom I was a TA, I remember remarking that the food at the gathering was “food with ingredients.”  I think by that I meant food from “scratch”? Somehow that was the real type of food and while what we ate wasn’t.

Now we have children, and I suspect there is still something less than “real” about our food, but at least now I am cooking with ingredients, and as few as possible it seems.  Though the processes, pans and power tools angst me, and the mess and time and dreary mechanical methods madden me, I would be even less happy in the paradigm of bagged bread, cake mix, and condensed soup.  

Oh yes, we do eat boxed macaroni and cheese, and saltines make my 11-year- old son ecstatic.   I guess for me those ingredients include more nutrients than fine-print additives and chemicals (sodium hexametaphosphate  is my favorite incantation), maybe love (although it’s a “Those Winter Sundays” type of love), but certainly soul force.