I like it when everything is in order. So let me start with my childhood memories.
All my life I have been a terrible sweet tooth. I don’t know if this is somehow transmitted with genes or it’s just a habit, but the fact is I adored and still adore sweets. Pulling off a cookie and chewing on it in bed before going to sleep was normal for me. 🍪😂 (Then my bed would be all in crunches. Facepalm.) Drinking tea with sweets instead of eating a healthy lunch was just perfect.
As a child, I spent a lot of time in a village with my grandparents, and my relatives often called me “chai-kuva", which means something like "tea lady" in the Mari language (that's my mother tongue, I can tell you more about it later if you like) because when my relatives asked what I would eat, I always answered: “Tea”. 😄 Basically tea was all my nutrition 🙈 And, of course, it was always accompanied by sugar and some sweets.
Although, as in any village at that time, people usually ate everything homemade since they kept cows, pigs, rams and domestic birds so we had milk, meat, eggs and bread was also homemade. For some reason I have never liked milk but I did love butter, they say (I don’t remember it myself 😂). I could take a huge piece of butter and eat it all alone. With time from homemade butter I switched to the one we bought in stores. I no longer liked the one my grandparents were making. I loved to put a huge piece of butter on a slice of bread and put some sugar on top of it. That was a really delicious dessert for me.
My other favorite dish was cottage cheese with sour cream and what? Sugar, of course! 😄 Clearly I haven't experienced any shortage of sugar and dairy. My dad used to say: “There were no cookies and sweets in our childhood. We were given a small piece of sugar, and we could nibble it the whole day”. Times change so quickly. Now sugar is everywhere.
Another thing that I remember from childhood is that our family loved meat. We ate meat every day. Besides, my father was a hunter so sometimes we would have wild ducks or hares for lunch. My favorite dish was mashed potatoes with cutlets. Every birthday or any other holiday we would feast with barbecue. So you can imagine, this type of food was a huge part of my life. If someone told me then that someday I would stop eating meat and dairy and sugar, I wouldn't believe it.
To be continued... :D
