One of my favorite websites sent out a link to their recipe for confetti cake. It is made with artificial coloring (in the confetti), colorless artificial vanilla (for that true “box cake” flavor), egg white, oil, and cake flour (bleached). My husband and I must be the only people left in the world who have no nostalgia for cake made from boxed cake mixes. Truly, if you want those flavors, it’s easier and much cheaper to go to a (bad) bakery and order your birthday cake.

I worked in a wonderful bakery that made the Danish dough from scratch but used an “apricot” glaze packaged in gallon metal tins and took orders for “bakeoff” pies that  were premade and frozen off site and merely baked in the bakery oven. The ingredients? I could not even begin to say, but by my twenties I knew enough not to eat one.

As children, my husband and I ate all sorts of overly-processed, chemically enhanced products: dyed black olives from cans, Hostess “bi-“products, Jif “peanut butter,” Wonder Bread (the original nationwide sliced bread), Spam, bologna, Velveeta in huge blocks and pre-sliced American cheese (cheese products), Mrs Butterworth’s syrup, sweetened dry breakfast cereals, KoolAide, jarred “sandwich spread,” canned fruit cocktail with the actually poisonous dyed red cherries. . . . I’ll stop there.

Yesterday I did not begin putting the new warp through the reed on my loom, but I did make granola and bread and cinnamon rolls. I read. I sorted through 2/3 of the junk piled all over my studio space and moved a chest and twenty storage bins to new locations (yikes!). I waited for a break in the weather to get a walk, I knit a few yards of I-cord while waiting for the bread to rise and watching several episodes of Grimm‘s first season. I made pasta with mushrooms and Parmesan for dinner.

In college, I read books about nutrition and began baking bread each Friday. I cooked everything from scratch while attending classes full time and working at least half time. (Which reminds me of another gripe: I once overheard an Upward Bound worker assuring a high school student that he would not have to attend class every day or even every scheduled class meeting. I had to restrain myself from calling him a liar.) In college, for the first time in my life, there was pepper in my kitchen, real maple syrup, and real vanilla extract. I tried cooking with wine. (I did not drink alcohol at all in college, or smoke anything, or even drink coffee or tea. I paid my own way and my only indulgence was buying a small handmade Chinese basket once a month for a dollar or two, about one hour’s wage.) I continued my experimentation with foreign dishes that began in high school. I met people from other countries in college and ate their food. The Fire Arts Ceramics potlucks were incredible (mafe and lentils and sweet potatoes with a crispy seed and honey topping).

I ate better living away from home than I ever had at home. I walked most everywhere. I graduated without debt. Yes, I have mentioned this before. I was earning $1.60 to $2.25/hour. (While completing my third degree, Gary supported us both and I went back to work over the winter holidays at $3.00/hour because I reminded HR I was fully trained and experienced and said I would not work for less.)

When I bake, I am not trying to emulate something out of a box. I have made madeleines and Genoise and other classic light-as-air cakes, and I prefer pound cakes. I want the flavor of butter and eggs and actual vanilla. Maida Heater’s Java Cake every time. Fruit cakes heavy enough to serve as door stops. Cakes that leak butter, pies sloppy with too many berries, and chocolate chip cookies once a year that are still melty from the oven.

And fresh feta-and-spinach ravioli, Waldorf salad made with dates and apples of many colors, thick vegetable soup rich with homemade stock, the buttercream is pink because it has blackberry juice in it, and when asked to make an orange cake for my grandson’s birthday, I flavor and color it with cooked down fresh orange juice.

In other words: I prefer real food.