I’ve always enjoyed cooking and feeding people. I am not a polished cook, nor do I possess good knife skills. Truthfully, I seem to only be able to make things that I really like to eat myself, which is a rather large category.
I don’t bake, except for cookies. I don’t know how to make roast beef. I’d love to cook Indian food, but then I look at a recipe for authentic butter chicken or tikka masala and between the amount of ingredients and the one-off spices I’d have to buy that I know I’d never ever ever use up, decide nah, and buy the jarred KFI sauces at Costco when they have them. (They’re really, really good.)
In spite of my limitations, I’ve developed a substantial repertoire of recipes over the years. It didn’t hurt that I spent maybe two decades editing the food pages for this newspaper, either. Some of my go-to favorites emerged from a feature we did for years that presented a recipe submitted by a reader each week.
So I’ve been making a lot of the recipes amassed over the years for holidays and other family gatherings forever. They formed the backdrop for many meals that my kids, nieces and nephews grew up with. Now they’re all in their late 20s to early 40s.
What has been unexpected is that now they’re making a lot of these same dishes. I get texts from a niece on her way to the grocery store in California asking about ingredients for the miniature egg rolls I make by the hundreds every Thanksgiving and Christmas. My daughter has adopted the Reflections White Chicken Chili recipe (it’s the best) as her own. I typically serve it with a cornbread that came out of the Recipe of the Week column.
My nephews have mastered the vodka sauce I made every Thanksgiving because what self-respecting Italian family doesn’t have pasta on Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or just because it’s Tuesday? I have made that recipe probably a hundred times and still am filled with trepidation every time that I’ll singe my hair, melt my glasses or scorch the ceiling while the flames shoot high as the alcohol burns off.
The “kids” have since gone beyond and forged their own food paths. My son has perfected a Bolognese sauce that takes hours to make and is oh so good. My nephews spent some time with the baker in the small Italian mountain town my grandmother came from and now turn out hundreds of authentic specialty Italian cookies for holidays and other occasions. One of them decided to take on making homemade croissants — a laborious process, but so worth the effort (says the aunt who gets to enjoy them dripping with butter after all of the work is done).
I used to make baklava at the holidays (a recipe from interviewing a Greek lady for a food story during my very first newspaper job). Now now my nephew does, so I rarely do anymore.
But I’m loving watching this next generation assume their places in the kitchen, even as I’m glad when they ask for one of my old recipes. A lot of my memories are tied up in food — my Italian grandma’s pasta, my mom’s mother’s fried chicken, my grandpa’s butter burgers long before Culver’s made them a thing. So are theirs, even as they create more of their own.