My Gelato filled hot summer childhood memories

The first thing I thought of when trying to think about what foods came to mind as summer foods that revisit childhood memories was Gelato.



 So it was nice to see that something from our childhood still remains the same.  On hot days or on the odd occasion during the summer one of my friends dad would pile a bunch of us kids into the car and drive us to Nino D'Aversa Bakery for some Gelato.  We didn't wait for an ice cream truck because we lived on a main street that Ice Cream trucks couldn't stop on.   So when we wanted ice cream we either got it from the convenience or grocery store or we got the good stuff once in a while at the Bakery.  That was the fastest way to make a bunch of kids happy and quiet.  As long as we were stuffing our faces full of Gelato we were content.  I think that's still true to this day for me.  I think my all time favourite food is Italian Food because not only does it remind me of hanging out at my friends houses when I was a kid but it's made with simple, fresh ingredients that bring out the purest flavours of the foods.
Ice Cream or Gelato is still one of my favourite foods to this day.  
For this post I stopped into  
Nino D'Aversa Bakery to get a Gelato and contemplate why I love it so much and appreciate that the place I went to as a kid is still the same as it was as I was a kid.  They did a little expansion a few years ago but it's basically still the same.
When I was a kid i think I used to get the lemon and chocolate flavours, but now I have switched from chocolate to coffee flavoured.  This Gelato is pure flavour.  The lemon tastes like a freshed squeezed lemon with a bit of sugar and the coffee flavour just tastes like you put a cappuccino in the freezer.
It's interesting that so many years later my friend's daughter now works at another Nino D'Aversa location.  Her grandfather is the one who drove us to get the Gelato's all summer long.  I hope that one day she carries on the tradition of taking a bunch of kids there for Gelato.   I don't have any kids to take there but if I did I most certainly would.

Food memories of childhood

It was so hot today I thought I was going to melt and no amount of water was going to help. The only thing that was going to make me feel a little better was Gelato.

I didn't just have any gelato I had gelato from the Bakery I went to when I was a kid. In about a week I will be moving and out of the neighbourhood I lived in most of my life. I have been busy purging and packing up things in the house and needed an ice cream break today so I decided to go to Nino D'Aversa Bakery to get some Gelato. I used to go there all the time because my mother only wanted bread from there but when they started opening bigger grocery stores closer to home the bread came from there instead. But there is nothing like the smell of freshly baked bread when you walk into the bakery that makes it in the back of the store. Nino D'Aversa is an old school italian bakery/cafe where you can get fresh bread, pizza and hot table, gelato and other italian foods along with a cappuccino or whatever else you fancy.

Today's mission was to get some Gelato to cool off from the humidity on a sticky hot day. What was interesting was that as soon as I walked in the bakery and got a whif of the baked bread smell it instantly brought me back to childhood memories. When I was a kid my dad used to go to get bread at that bakery and most of the time I would go in to get it. It was also the place that my friends dad brought a bunch of us kids from our street for gelato to keep us out of trouble and happy. 4 or 5 of us kids would pile into his car and drive over to the bakery to load up on yummy gelato and for a little while we were quiet and happy. Now everytime I go into that bakery it reminds me of those days. Life was a lot simpler then. You want bread or ice cream you go to the bakery, not to one of a bunch of grocery stores. Grocery stores don't really have that same sense memory because most of the time nothing is made in store anymore so you don't have the smell of fresh food when you walk in unless it's artificially created to entice you to buy something.

I bet everyone has at least one sense memory of a smell or taste or sight of some sort of food that reminds them of their childhood. I guess bread and ice cream does it for me.... I guess that's why I am a sugar and carb addict. It just feels like home when I eat it. I can't imagine life without it.

What are your food memories from childhood? What does the food memory trigger in you?

Like I always say, Food is the thing that connects everyone and the thing that lives in our memories from the time we are born until we die. Tastes may change as we get older but the memories of the foods we loved when we were kids never changes or goes away.

What triggers your childhood food memories?