Homemade is better

Summer is over, the days have grown shorter and our instincts are urging us to fill our larders in preparation for the long cold. In essence, we are nothing more than large and mostly-hairless squirrels.

Except many of us no longer store food in the fall. We instead specialize in our jobs and leave the task of preserving and storing food to others.

Not that there is anything wrong with this — the victuals from Industrial Amalgamated Foodstuffs Inc. are probably just fine — but these food items are so perfect, so uniform, that they have all the charm of a gravel pit.

Give me hand-packed pickles that have some personality: sliced unevenly and with maybe a bit too much dill. And I do not mind if my sweet corn includes a dash of silk.  

I grew up eating home-baked bread and the veggies that were raised in our farm garden. It was impressed upon us kids that boughten food was inherently inferior. It also cost money, but my grasp of economics was feeble.

At school, we were introduced to the wonders of Wonder Bread. We immediately began to pester our parents to buy Wonder Bread, and they eventually gave in.

Things have come full circle. We will gladly pay extra for “hand-crafted” bread, which, in another time and at another place, was called “homemade.”

When I was a kid, the arrival of the late summer meant the start of the canning season. The kitchen, already sweltering, was turned into a virtual sauna by the army of steaming kettles Mom had standing at attention on our cookstove.

Lugs of stone fruit would appear in the pantry. Peaches, plums, cherries and apricots waited patiently in their wooden crates. None of those things were derided as boughten even though they clearly were not grown on our farm.

A lesson that I learned at that time had to do with plums.  

One autumn afternoon, I bit into a so-purple-it-was-almost-black plum and was thunderstruck by its incredible deliciousness. Despite dire warnings, I quickly wolfed down about a dozen plums. I soon learned the terrible meaning behind the term “purple revenge.”     

Another food-related item that has changed markedly over the years is the number of restaurant meals we consume.

When I was a youngster, eating at a restaurant was a big deal. Restaurant dining was considered wanton and wasteful and the sort of activity you only did on Leap Day — and then only if Leap Day landed on a Friday.

I had my first bona fide restaurant meal when I was about 11. My sister, Janet, had obtained a driver’s license and took her twin, Jane, my sister, Di, and me to Lone’s Cafe in Brookings.

It was a weird experience on many levels.

First was the idea of eating in front of all those strangers. Why would these people — all of them unknown to me — come here to watch me chew?

It was also odd to be served by anyone other than Mom. Who was this mysterious lady carrying food to us? Can we trust her? Is she licensed and bonded?

Hoping to appear suave, I ordered the Italian spaghetti. This was even though all my previous spaghetti experience had involved a guy named Chef Boyardee.

A humungous plate heaped with gleaming, slithery pasta was set before me. I dug into the saucy noodles. Good grief — those things were long. They bore only a slight resemblance to the earthworm-like spaghetti to which I was accustomed.

Spooling the noodles on my fork created a wad approximately the size of a cantaloupe. That would never do. Not knowing the proper protocol for eating such lengthy spaghetti, I decided to simply slurp the stuff, as seen in the movie “Lady and the Tramp.”

This worked fine, except I was not nearly as suave as the Disney dogs. Some of the noodles were approximately a yard long and required a high level of suction. The spaghetti tended to accelerate as it entered the alimentary canal, its end whipping wildly about like the tail of a freshly beheaded snake.

This would have been fine except for the marinara sauce. I noticed that nearby diners were wiping their faces frequently and casting annoyed glances my way. I thought they were overreacting until I got home and found that the hair at the back of my head was plastered with sticky, red sauce. That is pretty much when I gave up on ever being suave.

I resolved to never again eat pasta in public. Besides, Mom had plenty of homegrown tomatoes she could turn into sauce, and we could always raise some decidedly non-boughten spaghetti squash.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at [email protected].