Favourite food?

Quite often I hear someone say "What is your favourite food?" I could answer that Ice Cream is my favourite food because I could eat Ice Cream every day and would not get tired of it. But there are so many other foods I like that I can't name just one.

I mentioned in an earlier blog about the Dutch candy that a friend sent me. Can't leave that out of the favourite food category. Just one taste of it takes me back to elementary school. I can almost see my friends, at elementary age. I can smell the chalk dust in the air and hear the teacher calling all the grades, (from 1 to 6) to order.

Sausages. Breakfast sausages to be specific. They were a special treat when growing up. We didn't generally have them for breakfast. They were for supper most times. Thinking of them makes my mouth water. I don't eat sausages often anymore. Too much cholesterol, too greasy..my stomach protests now.

Fried dough...another food I seldom have anymore...too fattening...but soooo good. My mom deep fried her dough. Golden chunks of dough floating around in the deep fat fryer. Hot out of the fat and onto plates. Dipped in table syrup, molasses, smothered in butter or, if we were lucky we had some real maple syrup to drench the dough in. Fried dough was a standard in our home on Saturday night. While many other families in this area considered (and still consider) Saturday night as "Bean night", we had fried dough.

Sundays was a simple fare and when my sister and I were about 11 and 13 it was our job to make Sunday dinner. Generally it was grilled cheese sandwiches. Not the ones done on a grill. We put 6 slices of bread on a cookie sheet, added a slice of cheese on each piece of bread and turned the oven on broil for a few minutes. Simple and yummy. I consider it a comfort food now. One week sis had to do it and the next week I did. Good thing it was simple. Yet, almost every week sis would get distracted and the cheese would bubble up, turn black and then burst into flames. And every week we ended up having to pull the blackened bits off of the sandwich because you couldn't throw it away. That would be wasting food. I don't know why sis couldn't keep her attention on the oven, but more often than not, the sandwiches gave us a few moments excitement until we put the fire out.

Fresh bread baking...cut while hot, slathered with butter and home made jam.

Gingerbread cake drenched with a tart vinegar sauce. It tasted better than it sounds.

Tiny potatoes dug from the garden, wiped off and eaten as soon as they came out of the cool, damp earth.

Peas, picked from a friends garden in the cool of the evening. Eaten right out of the shell.

Wild strawberries, still warm from the sun. More flavour there than any cultivated strawberry would ever have.

Wild blackberries eaten while picking some to put in the freezer so that during the winter months they can be hauled out, eaten and remind us of the warmer days ahead.

Wild Blueberries.

A glass of cold buttermilk.

Thanksgiving dinner...even with squash, though I never cared for squash...I still eat it sometimes and am transported back through time, sitting at the "kids table" in my grandmothers dining room.

Candy canes at Christmas time.

So many favourite foods that I can't even think of them all. So, next time someone asks me what my favourite food is, I guess I can truthfully say "I don't have one"...because I don't. I have lots of favourite foods. I might not eat them often, but when I do, I get to go on a trip down memory lane.