I am not a big eater, I don’t exactly love food, at least compared to most other people. With that said, I have been known to dream about pasta. In fact, I used to dream about pasta on a regular basis because I ate it all the time. Well, I ate it all the time, and I used to always eat tons of it right before going to bed. At the time that I was dreaming about pasta on the regular, I was actually eating very poor food. It was basically off-the-shelf pasta with off-the-shelf pasta sauce, so you can imagine my excitement when my buddy’s Italian grandma visited one summer in college. Tom was adopted, so when I met him nothing about him really suggested “Italian.”
As we got to know each other, and when I finally met his mother, I realized why Tom was always using these Italian recipes to cook up dinner with. Tom loved Italian recipes, and when his grandma visited us, it immediately became clear why he loved them. There are different levels of food out there, and everyone understands that on some level. For instance, do you like steak? I do, but that doesn’t mean I’ll eat whatever steak you put in front of me. In fact, I only eat steak when I consider it to be very high quality steak, otherwise, I’m not interested in it. Well, turns out this was the same with Italian food. When Tom’s grandma showed up and made Italian recipes from scratch, for me, it was like eating food that was entirely different from what I had been dreaming about during high school. I am not even sure how I can explain this, but have you ever had something that you thought was the original, only to find out that it isn’t original at all?
Then, when you get the original, it’s like your brain can barely comprehend it. While I didn’t have a good understanding of just what homemade Italian recipes would taste like, I did have some perspective. See, I was raised in a home where my father helped to produce food for the grocery store while my mother was a professional baker. The differences between those two tasks could hardly be greater. When you are producing food to go to the shelves of a grocery store, you have to deal with a whole host of constraints that you never have to consider when selling a product directly to the customer. Things like the FDA, and preservatives come into play. You start dealing with words that no one on the planet can pronounce and only a few people can actually understand. Because of all these constraints, I knew that food that hit the grocery store shelf just couldn’t be as good as the food that comes out of a cook’s kitchen; it just wasn’t possible.
Knowing something and experiencing it, however, are two entirely different things. When Tom’s grandma visited we would quickly be put to work. Making pasta from scratch took some man power and it took some resources. The first thing was that we needed to get all the ingredients, and once we got all of those we had to start helping with the actual production. It was a very big deal for us, particularly since we would basically eat until we physically couldn’t. Of course, all the work was more than worth it. Once the meal was ready, we would feast like it was our last day on earth. Unfortunately, through all of that cooking, I still don’t know how to make a good Italian dish, but at least I know when I’m eating one…
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