That's what my grandma says when the rest of the family is sitting around the Thanksgiving (or Christmas, or Easter) dinner table, wolfing down the feast she's made, and someone says, "Hey Grandma, sit down and eat something."
I don't think I've ever seen my Grandma eat anything more than a Christmas cookie at holiday gatherings. I hope that's because she really is full, from eating an earlier meal (since she got up earlier than the rest of us) or maybe from several hours of nibbling and tasting the various dishes to make sure they're coming out right. Or maybe she polishes off a dozen cookies when they come fresh out of the oven, and the rest of us get the seconds. Who knows?
I think about that "filled up on the smell" thing a lot when I am cooking these days, because I've worked pretty hard at abolishing the habit of eating nibbles, ends, licks and crusts in the kitchen. This is an extremely hard habit to break, but it's a worthy one, especially if (like me) you're the primary cook for the family and also participate heavily in the cleaning up after meals. An awful lot of peanut butter and jelly crusts pass through my hands, if you know what I mean.
I made dinner this morning. The menu is tomato soup (it's simmering in the crockpot, I'll run it through the blender later), homemade bread, ricotta-and-egg salad, and green salad. I was mixing up the egg salad and thinking about eating scrapings from the bowl.
There are at least three advantages to dropping the nibbling-while-cooking habit that I can think of. First, most directly, you can mindlessly eat a lot of calories in the kitchen. Three kids' bread crusts amounts to maybe half a sandwich. The scrapings from a can of tomato paste can be a whole tablespoon. And then there's stuff like sweet cornbread batter -- a quarter cup can come out of that bowl! You should have baked it. Second, there's the general habit of putting things in your mouth when you're not hungry. It's better not to reinforce it every time there's a meal or snack, because it bleeds outward. You start to expect to be chewing something, Pavlovian doggy style, every time you walk into the kitchen. Finally -- Grandma's right, you do get "filled up on the smell." If I ate several mouthfuls of egg salad scraped out of the bowl twenty minutes before coming to the table, I wouldn't enjoy the egg salad nearly as much as part of the meal. It's rich. Eat a little bit and you don't really need a lot more. So much nicer to sit down and have it spread on fresh homemade bread, with a little minced black olive on top and a hot mug of soup on the side.
I am a pretty good cook, if I may say so myself, and I put some thought most of the time into crafting meals that are nutritionally complete, with a variety of flavors and textures that complement one another: the sweet with the tangy, the hot with the cool, the creamy with the crisp. I do this because I like to make things pleasant for my family. I wouldn't hand my husband (or even one of my children) a wooden spoon and a big bowl and say "Hungry? Here, scrape some egg salad out of here and stick it in your mouth. I'll get you some crackers to go with it in a minute." No, I wouldn't do that, and you know what? I deserve to have my food as part of a meal just as much as they do.
Maybe even more, since I cooked the darn thing!
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