A foodie is born…
January 13, 2010
When my sister and I were quite young, my parents would regularly abandon us to go gallivanting round Paris on holiday. (My dad lived there for a while before he and my mum got married, so had a lot of friends there.) The only upside to these traumatic childhood events was the goodies they would bring back with them.
This being the early 1970s, the exotic items we are so used to nowadays weren’t available in the UK, so my parents would often come back from France laden with things like garlic, wine and, most exciting of all, fresh artichokes. I, apparently, developed quite a taste for them, and Mum and Dad would often have to sacrifice a few leaves to the five-year-old staring dolefully at them while they tried to enjoy their dinner.
The occasion captured in the above photo was the first time Ailsa and I were allowed to have an entire artichoke for ourselves, and was taken in our house in Edinburgh in about 1974. The story goes that when Mum told us what we were having for dinner that evening, I looked up at her, my eyes welling up, and gasped, “A whole one…? Just for me…?”
And thus, my foodie destiny was assured.
What are your childhood food memories? Are there any meals or foodstuffs that stand out as particularly memorable from when you were young?
And the cupboard was bare… 
January 15, 2010 at 7:53 am
My mum used to make a wonderful chocolate cake with chocolate butter icing as our birthday cakes – even though my brother’s birthday is on Christmas day.
I had to have an operation on my 12th birthday, so was not able to eat the cake my mother had brought into the hospital.
A day or two later I said to one of the nurses that I would really enjoy some of my birthday cake.
There was a very sheepish silence and then she admitted that the nurses had eaten the whole cake!
I can still remember the moment when my pleasurable anticipation crumbled.
Needless to say, Mum made me another one when I got home – safe from marauding nurses!
January 15, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Holidays along the south coast with the treat of sit down fish and chip resturants.
Also boxs of cox apples bought from the orchards around the family village of Storrington.