The Power of Home Cooking

I loved the smell of coffee long before I ever drank it. When I was very young, I remember the smell of coffee brewing in the percolator, the smell of bacon frying and the murmur of adult voices. At Grandma’s and Thanksgiving morning at home, I would wake up to those smells and sounds. To this day, the smell of coffee and bacon in the morning comforts me.

Although my mother wasn’t a great cook, we almost always ate at home. She made a few things that I now consider comfort foods, beef stew, creamed tuna on toast, and oven fried chicken. My grandmother taught me to make the same fried chicken that my mother used to make. When my grandmother came for a visit, she brought gumdrop cake and potatoes. Because my grandmother and grandfather came at Thanksgiving, it was our big holiday of the year. Maybe that is why home cooking is so important to me.

I no longer eat any of those foods, but I think about them on occasions when I’m in the kitchen cooking a meal from “scratch”. Some of my kid’s favorites are pesto, sausage, tomato and basil spaghetti sauce, pumpkin pie, blackberry pie and apple pie. I love that they have favorites. Maybe someday after they have moved away the smell of an apple pie cooling on the counter will bring them back to me, if only in their memories.