Thank GOD For Family Food

So first let me recognize that most of my posts are about food. How delicious food is, how much I love food, how much I crave food and so on. But, if you know me, you know that I have this very generous love hate relationship with food. In the past it's because food was my comfort and my pain. Around about August 13, it will again become that for me. However, right now, I am just enjoying that I don't have to track every calorie that I eat. I am also enjoying being freed from the constraints of healthy recipes that include products I have never heard of or seen in any regular grocery store.

Marvel's Jedi food stare

On Saturday, I woke up and enjoyed a breakfast of grapefruit, cheese and toast with peanut butter and homemade raspberry rhubarb jam. I am just so thankful for the small things in life like homemade jam. Every time my parents come to visit, they bring enough raspberry jam and mucky duck mustard (not homemade but only found up north so far) to get us through the year. Every time we go back to Michigan, we buy enough maple syrup to last us until our next visit.

I really do cherish family recipes. I have asked my mom to work on collecting family recipes for me as she thinks of it so I can continues to carry of the joy of food. The funniest thing happens when you collect recipes sometimes though. Sometimes you find out that although you thought it was a family recipe you find out it's actually a recipe off the back of a box or a well known cookbook. My grandma's butterscotch oatmeal cookies are found on the back of the butterscotch chip package. My mom's beef stroganoff, a recipe that I couldn't seem to duplicate no matter how hard I tried, is actually from the Betty Crocker cookbook that has been in my kitchen for probably 10 years now. Despite all this, these recipes will still be family recipes to me because they feel like home when I am eating them.