I made sloppy joes for dinner the other night. The checker at the grocery store – the one who always tries to guess what I’m cooking based on the ingredients in my cart – asked what I had in mind. “Ooo. What’s your recipe?” she asked, as she scanned my items.

“Um,” I answer rather sheepishly. “It’s just the classic sloppy joe thing: mustard, onion, green pepper…”

“Ketchup?” she adds.

“Actually, no,” I tell her. “The last time I made them, I used ketchup and the mince was too sweet. So I’m trying tomato sauce and enough brown sugar to get the sweet level right.”

“I just can’t make them quite like I remember them tasting like they did when I was a kid,” she lamented.

And I agreed. I think when we were kids, ketchup was the most delicious sauce I could imagine. I wanted its bright red sweetness to overwhelm the taste or texture any meat that was placed in front of me. But now, as an adult, I rarely use ketchup at all. I find its flavor overwhelming. Awful. Hell, I’ll eat fries without ketchup (on the odd occasion I order fries).

The sloppy joes without ketchup turned out fine. I was able to adjust the sweetness of the sauce – something that really is the marker of the dish, no doubt – dialing it down to my old-age taste buds.

When I tried my hand at recreating fig newtons yesterday, I was reminded again of that gulf between foods you remember fondly from childhood – all the sweetness, the processed ingredients – and what those foods taste like (and make your body feel like) when you’re older.

I can’t remember the last time I ate the Nabisco trademarked variety. I know that they come in all sorts of flavors these days. I’ve had the Newman variety more recently, I suppose. It’s a snack that reminds me of my grandmother, who always seemed to have a cupboard full of pre-packaged crap like that – crap I’d never get at home. Neither fig newtons nor sloppy joes are “comfort foods.” But they are things that remind me of some of the joyful moments of eating food that, as a kid, I felt was made for me.

I’d purchased some figs at the store the other day that, when I bit into one, I realized weren’t quite ripe. So I decided to cook them into something. I’m not sure why I decided that I’d make a fig jam and roll it inside a whole wheat cookies, but that’s what I did. Like the sloppy joes, they turned out better than the original. I added cardamom to the dough. The fig jam was made with honey and actual ripe figs not high fructose corn syrups and whatever-the-hell-that-fig-thing-is-in-this-video. That’s the trick of recreating foods that have that nostalgic aspect to them, I think. Recreate the joy of eating food that is actually made for you.