Eating Habits, Then and Now

In my  profile, I only explained how I changed my eating habits 30 years ago, but here is a little history of my background growing up in an Italian family that every time you turn around you were eating some kind of delicious food, laden with high fat. Boy, it was good stuff!

Above is a picture of my Mom holding my grandbaby, Callie. This picture was taken back in Apirl, 2011, when we visited my family in West Virginia. Callie is the 4th generation born to our family, she is 6 months in this picture and my Mom just turned 83 years old.

When I was growing up my Grandma lived with us and she was always in the kitchen baking or cooking something that was tasty. The best dinner was on Sunday, after church my Mom and Grandma would start making our Italian supper that consisted of meatballs and meat sauce, pasta, fried chicken, Italian bread and salad. The meatballs were unbelievable scrumptious because of the ingredients which included ground chuck, homemade breadcrumbs, soaked Italian bread in milk, eggs, garlic, fresh basil, fresh grated Romano cheese, salt, and pepper. She would mix the ingredients altogether and roll into meatballs and fry in about two inches of Crisco vegetable shortening. Next, she'd drop the meatballs into the meat sauce, she had prepared before church. The sauce was simmering on the stove with oil floating on top of the meat sauce and the aroma from the garlic and fresh basil was heavenly. My Grandma use to say, " the oil flavored the sauce, so don't skim it off with a spoon" and boy did it. I use to love Sundays at our house!

Of course, my Grandma handed down all her recipes to my Mom and now my sister that leaves in Virginia and me have the recipes. I am going to try and put together a keepsake recipe book of all the family recipes, so we can hand them down to our children. Hopefully, they will use the recipes only at holiday time, because they will be full of fat and high calories. Yum!

This is just an example of how I ate then. Now that I am older and my metabolism has slowed down. I had to improve my eating habits to healthy foods such as whole grains, vegetables and chicken or fish. I know routines are difficult to alter, yet one's quality of life can improve with better eating habits.