The Great Grandma Standard
As a six year old, I could barely open the heavy storm door at my great grandmother’s house, but I was always the first one running up the stairs. I would kick off my shoes (literally) and slip through the door, to be greeted by the greatest perfume in the world – freshly baking bread. My great grandmother always had a fresh loaf in the oven when we came to visit, a tradition that she carried on until she was in her nineties.
Unfortunately, I don’t have her old bread recipes. My mother and grandmother left their kitchens with Marlo Thomas in the sixties. But I can guarantee that her bread was made with just a handful of ingredients, and she probably knew the people who had grown the wheat.
We are in the midst of a menu “audit’ here at the depot. Every item on the menu, every ingredient we use is being held up to what I am calling the Great Grandma Standard. If it contains ingredients that Great Grandma Peterson wouldn’t recognize as food, and something that my 6 year old self couldn’t have pronounced, we are taking it off of the menu.
This process will take some time, and there will be some experimentation along the way (we are currently working on making our own pastrami) but I know the end result will be something that all of us here at the depot can be proud of.
Here’s to a healthy and tasty year ahead.
Pam
