My Journey With Food

I remember the first time I thought I'd like to be a chef as an adult - it was right after my great-grandmother died. We simply called her Grandma Miller growing up, and my grandmother and mother don't talk about her much for reasons still unclear to me so I don't actually know her first name. She passed away when I was just 6 years old, but I have a few distinct memories of her.

Like I talked about before in my recipe post about sugar cubes, that's one. She always had home-made, flavored sugar cubes on her coffee table for anyone who came over for coffee or tea. She also had a pretty massive garden in her backyard. When I'd get left with her for a day or something my great-grandmother would always send me out to gather a basket full of veggies to have with dinner. I remember collecting carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, garden peas, cucumbers, various kinds of squash and more, and once I brought them inside she'd lift me onto the counter and have me help by holding the veggies until she could wash them off and cut them up.

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I can't remember any of the dishes she made, but she let me watch and help as much as was safe for a child my age. And when she passed away, I wanted to honor her memory by becoming a cook. Seeing this, my grandmother began to teach me as much as she could within the limits of how much I saw her and what my mother would allow.

My mother, unfortunately, was very over-protective and refused to let me do too much. I wasn't allowed to operate cooking equipment outside of a microwave until I was a teenager but even then only with supervision, and I wasn't allowed to operate them unsupervised until I graduated high school. I often did so anyway when she wasn't home or when I was alone with my grandmother who also thought she was being very silly with such restrictions, but it was a great hindrance to my cooking regardless. The second big thing holding me back was that my mother often did not like what I cooked because we have very different tastes - she likes her food bland with just red pepper flakes or similar to make them spicy, but I like to experiment with things like curry or paprika to add heat and spices like anise or lavender to add flavor. The fact that she wouldn't eat anything I cooked and she was really the only one I had to test my recipes on any kind of consistent basis did terrible things to my self-esteem in terms of cooking.

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Still, I persisted. I wanted to go to culinary school for college once I graduated high school, but my mother said if I did she wouldn't pay for it nor would she pay for the gas to get me to and from classes or any of the supplies I might need. She wanted me to go to a 'normal' school and get a 'normal' job and basically hated everything that I was in terms of my personality and interests and everything else to do with me. Like in How To Train Your Dragon when the father says Hiccup needs to be different and gestures to all of him, indicating that he needs to change the entirety of himself in order to be worth anything or make his father proud.

So I went to regular college but continued to cook as much as possible. Mostly when my mother would leave for long weekends or other long periods so I could cook a day or two after she left and have the leftovers be gone by the time she got home leaving her none the wiser.

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When I finally moved out my grandmother gave me a parting gift - a large box full of smaller boxes, on which were hand written recipes from herself and my great-grandmother. She told me she hadn't wanted to give it to me while I lived with my mother because she was afraid my mother would try to get rid of them or do something similar and these are the closest thing my grandmother has to a family heirloom.

The two years I spent living with her before I moved into my current location last year I spent cooking up a storm. I did everything I could to learn these recipes, come up with my own, and digitize the note cards so it would be harder for them to be lost forever. There are so many that there are still some I haven't been able to get to, and some I've had to give serious updates to for the 70+ years that have passed since my great-grandmother put them together because the brand no longer exists or there's a better alternative ingredient or just a better way in general to do it.

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It's been a long, long road. I wish my mother wasn't so set in her ways and her demands of me to refuse to allow me to go to a culinary school, but I can't change the past. All I can do is use my experiences to continue cooking every day and keep moving forward to become a better cook and share the recipes with the world through steemit and related platforms <3