For The Love of Food ...

Food played always an important part in my life. When I grew up in East-Germany, we never went hungry but we had to be satisfied with just the basic foods like bread, potatoes, some sausage, and cooked vegetables. We didn’t have refrigeration in the early 50’s, so the only conservation was canning and pickling. We did alright as a family since we had a big garden and grew some delicious fruits and some vegetables.
I started to experiment with cooking during my teenage years. By that time my parent had fled with our family to West Germany and we enjoyed during the winters fresh citrus fruits and more variety of food choices.

My mother is a very good cook but she could not teach me because she never measured her portions. So I learned mostly from cookbooks and in home economics. I very much enjoyed making international dishes with names I could neither pronounce nor really knew what they were supposed to taste. My family was not always excited to eat what I had cooked, especially when it included strange things like nuts in a gravy or spices they had never heard off.

Before I came the U.S. I had never opened a box to make a meal or bake a cake. I had made everything from scratch and still do when I have enough time. The flavor and spices I use are just not in the frozen dinners or come in a boxed cake.
When I later traveled to France and Italy, and very much later to the U.S. and the orient, I came to appreciate international foods.
To give myself a treat this week, I invited my daughter to watch to movie “Julie & Julia.” I have only one thing to say, it was hilarious, I laughed so hard because I could relate to so many situations in the movie and was comforted when Julia scraped potato pancake from the stove and put it back in the pan or when Julie overslept the timer and forgot to take out her “Boeuf à la Bourguignonne.”
It’s amazing how one women, Julia Child, changed to whole kitchen scenery in the U.S. and brought American women back into the kitchen. And Julie, bless her heart, went through all the trouble, in making all the 524 recipes from the “The Mastering of Art of French Cooking” without getting the approval or acknowledgement of the master chef herself. But why was she sad when Julia passed away in 2004? In her own words: she had grown to unite with Julia in spirit and action during the year she committed to the cooking project and even though they never met, she felt as if she had know her.
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Bon Appetit! Enjoy!