This post first appeared on goshencommons.org on Feb. 2, 2013
As a teenager, I had decided that I was never going to do traditional household work such as cooking. I was going to be a professional woman and live solely on cheese sandwiches and ice cream.
Though Pete still does most of the cooking in our house, I do sometimes cook. And I certainly do engage in food preservation: canning, freezing and storing produce in our basement.
So what changed?
What changed is that I started growing my own food.
Even though I didn’t want to cook, I still had this desire to plant things – edible things. So I planted. And edible things grew. And then I needed to do something with the produce that I had grown. I wanted to cook with it. And, before I knew it, I was making more than cheese sandwiches.
Even more than cooking the bounty from my garden, I wanted to store it so that I would have my homegrown produce over the winter months. Looking back over my preserving tallies from 2009 and 2010, I think I may have gotten a little carried away. Fifty-two pints of sweet pickles and 45 half-pints of red hot sauce seems a little excessive. We’re still eating those pickles and that hot sauce from 2009 and 2010 (and likely will for years to come).
I wonder if others have experienced this change in attitude toward cooking (and canning) after growing one’s own food.
(I still do like cheese sandwiches.)