Elevating the Pantry

I haven’t been cooking for the last few days. As much as I love to cook, I think that I also like the break from the obligations of family dinners from time to time. We’ve had a lot of evening events this week, so dinner has been either a quick-nothing -to -write about family favorite like beef stroganoff or tacos. I say this because there are innumerable recipes out there for both and ours tends to take the form that my little children liked years and years ago and now like to come home to, a sort of taste memory that reminds them of the comfort of their childhoods. And, since her taste buds are just developing, our middle schooler prefers these dishes to my “experiments.”

In this day and age when foodies are constantly trying to “elevate” recipes, it made me wonder what place comfort foods- defined differently in different families- has. For example, my stroganoff is made with ground beef. I know it’s classically made with beef slices from a round roast or other tough form of meat. It was, after all, invented to deal with tough cuts of meat, to make them palatable. But, my kids would never eat it that way, so we persist in making it with ground beef. My kids are older now and will be more adventurous, but when I was a young mother, I just wanted them to eat something besides mac and cheese.

I balance this, though, against an increasingly visible cooking world full of specialized ingredients. Personally, sometimes I feel like making Tournedos Rossini and sometimes I feel like making a regular old cheeseburger. The thing, I guess, I get judgmental about is when folks with cooking blogs and cooking shows demonstrate using processed foods. Instead of homemade stock, they use broth in a carton from the grocery store shelf. Instead of making pasta, they use pre-made, again from the grocery store shelf. Sure, these things take time to make but if you really love to cook, stocking your pantry is every bit as rewarding as preparing some insanely complicated dish. I find solace in these, perhaps tedious, tasks. They remind me of what I love about cooking, perfecting a skill.

I also get really zen. I’ll set aside a day, turn on my favorite music and make pasta all day. There is nothing more enjoyable to me than cutting up a mire poix  or the smell of bones roasting at 7 am so I can get my stock going early. The great thing about making stock is that you leave it alone for the day and when you return you have this beautiful and very useful tool in your pantry.

In this day and age where we tend to worry about the quality of the food we are serving our families, I really can’t understand processed foods. If anything perhaps the sort of elevation we should be looking to in our cooking is a harkening back to basics that will serve us well day to day. Going to the freezer to fetch some homemade lasagna noodles makes me feel good about what I’m making my family.

I know it takes time. But what else should we be making time for than to live well. Isn’t cooking really about living well? Why skimp?