I Am a Food Snob

I have pretty high standards for the food I am willing to eat.  I am not picky per se as I like almost all food, though it has to be lactose free these days. But it has to be worth eating.  Before we had dietary issues we always ate a wide variety of foods and fast food was not on the menu except for the occasional  pizza and some take out Chinese.  The only time either child ate fast food like Mc Donald's it had to do with some team sports activity.  Certainly it didn't come into our home.  I cook from scratch and was a really good baker in the pre gluten free days.  Like many families, birthday meals were chosen by the one whose birthday it was.  That included desert of course made by me.  Josh and Seth generally chose chocolate pecan pie and Alex's favorite was cheese cake.  Before lactose intolerance of course. Josh, my older child is an excellent cook.

It amuses me no end, that Alex who while she knew how to cook was not willing to cook for herself.  She'd occasionally have friends to dinner her senior year and she'd cook, but knowing that she wouldn't feed herself we insisted she take the meal plan at least during the week even though she had a kitchen.  In Korea she ate out or had take out most nights.  Food was cheap so why cook?  Now that she's engaged and living in Austin where eating out costs much more than it did in Korea she is cooking.  Her cousin Simon sent her two cookbooks and after consulting her older brother she asked for The Joy of Cooking which we sent  her.  She also calls her food consultant, namely her mother.  Having grown up with food being cooked from scratch and of a pretty high order, she finds that she has much higher standards for food than her fiance.  It was his birthday this week and what did he want for desert?  Cherry pie.  So Alex made him a cherry pie.  He said oh just buy ready made crust. Alex said, of course not I'll make it.  Of course the ready made stuff is probably not lactose free. She used canned cherries in juice, fine it's not cherry season after all.  He said you mean you didn't just buy canned filling?  Incredulous, she said of course not! That's the easy part of a pie after all. He was impressed.  She only made a few phone calls to her food consultant.  She sent me a picture of the finished pie and it looked lovely.  Hopefully it tasted just as good.  For a child who liked to eat but never wanted to cook she has  embraced cooking  good  food as worth the effort.  Eating well is healthy and affordable and even fun.