Distractions

Today is the office Thanksgiving potluck. It doesn't start for an hour, but the aromas wafting from the staging area are wonderful. I know there are chocolate oatmeal cookies -- I can see those. We have mashed potatoes and gravy, ham, turkey, a ton of casseroles and veggie dishes and two tons of dessert.
I brought my pumpkin bread, pumpkin butter, cranberry bread and apple butter. I spent Saturday roasting a big (at least 10 pounds) pumpkin and making stuff from it (pumpkin butter, pumpkin bread, pumpkin-cranberry muffins). It's not something my mother did, but I discovered fresh pumpkin tastes waaaay better than canned.
My mother made most everything from scratch, and I do the same. She used canned cranberry sauce and I refuse to buy it because it only takes a few minutes to make my own and it's so much better.
I grew up wanting to try Hostess Twinkies because they were something my mother couldn't make -- you could only BUY them. That spongy-looking cake and fluffy "creme" filling called to me, but my mother refused to buy them. Instead I had homemade chocolate cake with seven-minute boiled frosting (like marshmallow), drizzled with dark chocolate; spice cake with vanilla buttercream frosting; yellow cake with chocolate fudge frosting; apple pie with the flakiest crust you can imagine; cookies; homemade fudge; doughnuts ... all because we were too poor to buy Twinkies.
When I was in the fourth grade we took a class trip to the Hostess factory, and at the end of the tour, we each got a Twinke and milk.
Finally, I would taste this exotic treat.
I didn't want the other kids to know we were too poor to buy them, though, so I acted as though this is what we had for dessert all the time, even though the other kids had seen me eating all that poor-kid homemade crap.
I nonchalantly picked up the Twinkie and sank my teeth into it.
That might be the moment the food snob seed germinated in me .
The Twinkie tasted like sawdust with sugar. The creme obviously had no butter, and it was gritty, not creamy. I managed to swallow it, followed by the entire container of milk, and left the rest of it on my paper plate.
I couldn't pass that lesson on to my own kids -- they had to experience it for themselves. But we were poor, and my kids were sure that's why we didn't have Keebler cookies in the house or store-bought cakes and pies, which my older son was certain were better than poor-people homemade crap.
But once he married and had kids of his own, he started talking about the treats I used to bake -- the whoopie pies (soft chocolate cookies with vanilla creme sandwiched in the middle), oatmeal raisin cake, cookies, pies.
And my younger son became a total food snob. Having dinner with him is like eating with a restaurant critic.
But when they come to Mom's for a holiday dinner, they get the same homemade poor-kid crap I always cooked, and they love every bite of it.