When you think of home cooking, you might think of those famous plates of food your grandma brings to you fresh from the kitchen: the ones you always look forward to because they get your mouth watering at the mere mention of the dish. If you come from a family where the garden is king, you know that fresh is always the name of the game, and always wins the most hearts at the end of the day.

 

We are talking about freshly picked romaine lettuce straight from the ground, incredible beefsteak tomatoes as round, plump, and juicy as you can imagine, sweet peppers for flavour and hot peppers for kick, or fresh crab apple jelly created with apples ripe off the tree. Everyone in the old country grew a garden to feed their families and supplement their meals, and it’s a tradition that has always brought the best foods to the table year in and year out. A seasoned home cook will scour the markets for the freshest ingredients, finding their go-to vendors and developing relationships with them to consistently bring home the best quality foods for their super-secret family recipes.

 

All of this sounds wonderful, and yet we always seem to be drawn to the allure of the restaurant-style of cooking. While they absolutely deserve their place as entertainment and also as an art form, the food itself is not really the best, even in the finest of restaurants. There are many tricks in the restaurant business that can be used to make food taste good, all of which usually involve an overabundance of salts, fats, butter or stocks. The matter of seasonality is another issue, as a restaurant’s menu might vary slightly from season to season, but will rarely change. The idea is that they want you to find the few items on their menu that will have you coming back again and again, and have that item available at any time of the year. That way, if you have a craving for that particular variety of dish, you know exactly where to find it, and will open your wallet to get it.

 

You see, the restaurant business cares about only one thing: the experience. So long as you find yourself drooling and craving more, it doesn’t matter what gets put on the plate. Sure, there are regulations that require restaurants to adhere to certain guidelines, but there is still a lot of wiggle room when they ultimately build your great tasting dish. They try to emulate what we already know is good food: the good old-fashioned cooking from grandma’s kitchen. They find shortcuts like cheaper ingredients and extra additives to make it seem like they’re doing the job while also being able to produce large amounts of food for large amounts of customers. And the worst part is, it’s working.

 

So if the restaurant business is trying to make it feel like they’re cooking from home, why are we trying to cook at home like the restaurants? Here at Laura’s Catering, we bring back homestyle using the good old-fashioned methods of cooking, just like grandma used to make. If you’re looking for a restaurant or catering services in Winnipeg using only the best and freshest of ingredients, contact us so you too can taste the difference!