Family CookBooks Thru the Years! The Cookbook I made of my mom's recipes, on top.
Back about 20 years ago, I started thinking about family recipes. I knew I could always call my mom or my aunt and get some of my grandmother's or family recipes. HOWEVER, I wanted a better memory of the family recipes.
As a little kid, I remember Sunday's at my grandmother's house, the scents of a big Sunday dinner cooking. In my own home, my mom always cooked big meals too.
I remember learning this, one of the very first recipes, Pasta Sauce! Sunday's we were either at my Yia Yia's, or at home, and there was always a big pot on the stove all day, cooking and simmering the sauce!
Pasta and the sauce is probably one of the first meals I cooked, too. Using my mom's, and my Yia Yia's recipe. The real secret, really is that the recipe is made from scratch and probably different almost every time I make it.
for me, my sauces start the same: Browned seasoned ground meat. I cook with ground turkey, now. Slightly healthier than my mom's ground beef and pork. I use my own home made tomato sauce and paste from my own garden, where they used store bought.
The methods of cooking? Same. Seasonings? Same. But the extras? well,k that differed from week to week in our house growing up.
It was never really about the actual ingredients... as I came to understand later in life. The sauce became the sauce, with all the leftovers added in. The sauce became the sauce with all day simmering. The REAL secret of the sauce?
It was never about the food itself. It was in the hearth. It was the kichen that made the sauce. Gathering family all day, to laugh, cry, tell the same stories and sometimes hear new ones. It was the people gathered around my Yia Yia's stove, the scent of the pot simmering... her bustling about. The voices in the kitchen laughing,loud voices in the other rooms of the house too. It was gathering around my mom's kitchen table. Laughing and telling sometimes decades old stories. And the new stories of the day.
Even now, Sunday, gathered around my table, with my kids laughing and telling their own stories I see the recipe has been passed down!
But this all goes back to my first woman in my life, mom.
Ladies Of Hive contest number #185
BluefinStudios
