Who Doesn't Love Cheese?

 

While reaching for the almond milk in my fridge today, my mind skipped back a few decades to my childhood growing up in Bahrain.

A lot of our food came in cans: evaporated milk, Kraft cheddar cheese (in round blue cans), corned beef, sardines.  My mother said that around the age of two, I refused to drink any more milk. Stubborn and obstinate even at that young age. Nothing she could say or do would entice me to drink any more of that vile stuff (I mean really? Evaporated milk in tiny cans? What the heck was that?)

I thought I would look up what evaporated milk is, because I don’t really know. So, in case you also don’t know: it is milk that is heated to reduce 60% of the water. Condensed milk also has its water reduced but is sweetened with thick syrupy stuff. My mother used condensed milk in some of her sweet-making. My siblings would eat spoonfuls of it straight from the can. There’s no accounting for taste.

To this day I cannot abide the taste of milk. I do however love all other dairy products: heavy cream, yogurt, ice-cream and of course, the mother of all dairy products:  cheese. Ah, cheese! 

For many years I drank my coffee black (with a smidgeon of cardamom or cinnamon). These days I’ll add a drop of almond milk to it. (You know – black coffee, red wine – not good for teeth). When I was pregnant with my daughter (unbelievably 30 years ago!), the doctor advised me that I needed to drink milk for the calcium. I would chug down a glass of skim milk daily, holding my nose. Not enough, I know, but the doctor said, “Well, the baby will just take whatever calcium it needs from your body and will leave you depleted.” Okay, I thought, have at it baby. I’ll worry about my calcium stores later. But…now is the later!

Thinking back to those childhood days in Bahrain with so much of our food coming out of cans because fresh wasn’t readily available or too pricey, makes me so appreciate how blessed we are here in Canada with an abundance of fresh food, fruits and vegetables. And cheese.

I suppose the canned cheese we ate in Bahrain was processed, pressed and molded into thick, heavy discs resembling over-sized hockey pucks. I would most definitely turn up my more sophisticated cheese-sniffing nose at it now, but back then it was a treat, carefully doled out. 

Same for the slabs of Cadbury chocolate that sometimes made their way into our home. Each child was given two little squares, no more. Lest you think I lived a deprived childhood, I did not. It was just different. I had coins to spend, and on those afternoons when parents napped and children roamed free, I would run to the store down the street with my friends, purchasing gum balls and hard candy and liquorice twizzle sticks. You were either a red liquorice person or a black liquorice person. I was the latter.

When I think of today’s parents having to worry about school outbreaks and closures and home-schooling on top of everything else that goes along with parenting, I can’t fathom how stressful and difficult it must be. Yes, people wax on about how rewarding parenting is, and it is, but sometimes you can’t see that until later. Sometimes you’re so much into the just doing and coping and wondering and worrying above all else if you’re getting it right. And of course, we never get it completely right, none of us. My parents didn’t and neither did I. But we did the best we could.

And sometimes that meant feeding your kids canned milk, corned beef and ugly yellow cheese.