Gramma's Kitchen: Better than Wendy's!

On the day before Thanksgiving, we had the pleasure of a lovely little breakfast at Gramma's Kitchen outside of Mansfield, Pennsylvania. This is the only photo I successfully snapped before my camera battery died, which is a shame, because I'd have loved to snap one of the cute grannies on duty or the vegetable omelet with fresh and perfectly cooked broccoli inside! The hash browns were yummy, crunchy strings of potato. Our server could not have been nicer and didn't blink an eye when I asked her to hold the mushrooms and cheese or when I said I wouldn't need the toast.

I usually order fried eggs so that I know I'm getting real eggs, but we could see where the breakfasts were being cooked and had no doubt that our eggs would come from cartons. I don't imagine they were organic, and if the meat wasn't local (I didn't try any), I doubt the eggs were. But it was nice to support a local joint, and they had a natural foods stores advertising on their paper placemats, which my son enjoyed drawing on with the crayons his mama had in the car.

The place is largely a bakery, those of us avoiding gluten will miss out on enjoying the sources of the wonderful smells inside. My husband said his muffin was very pumpkin-y!

This is the third Thanksgiving we've driven from the DC Metro area to visit family in upstate New York. The second year my son was seven months old. He'd had a short tummy bug, and we thought about not going at all. Once we decided to, it was a hurry to get out the door, and we didn't pack all the safe gluten-free, dairy-free food we usually do. We missed our best opportunities to stop at a grocery store and found ourselves pretty hunger on Rt. 15 in northern Pennsylvania. We stopped at a Wendy's and ate only about a third of our sodium-saturated meal before getting back in the car to nurse my son and drive as fast as we could out of the mountains and toward the closest Wegmans. (We'd missed the exit for one in Williamsport and unintentionally did the same thing this time).

We got the recommendation for Gramma's Kitchen from a gas station attendant and then looked it up on my husband's Blackberry. It was a little over a mile from the second (I think) Mansfield, PA exit off of Rt. 15 (going North). It's hard to know where you're going to want to get some food, but it seems worth the time to wait for a small town and some food that might be seriously made by people.

Gramma's Kitchen is located at 1080 S Main St., Mansfield, PA Tel: (570) 662-2350