SP Contest #3

To write about my most emotionally connected recipe - that's the recipe that I got from my late mother-in-law for her pasta sauce. She was Italian, and her sauce is really good, and it's very special to me b/c she made it for us during her 'good week' when we visited over the summer. I chopped everything and did the stirring, but she was strong enough to come in the kitchen and put in a pinch of this and a sploosh of that, and to taste it & correct the flavor until it was perfect. Making that with her is a wonderful memory of a good time in the midst of much sadness.

So now when I make the sauce, the experience of learning how to do it comes back with the cooking, and happy memories abound with the eating. Especially when DH tells me that it really does taste just like hers.

If we're talking about a more long standing food memory, I would say apple pie, b/c I remember making oodles of apple pies with my grandmother and my mother. There was something so fun about that when I was a little girl. The slicing of apples, sprinkling of sugar, rolling of pie crust, of course mostly what I remember is being happy and content that everything in the world was good and enjoying spending time with them.

And then there's my chili recipe, which I made up all by myself. I remember that I couldn't find the mix I wanted and I decided that I was going to figure it out. It was really my first foray into making or altering a recipe to suit my tastes, and that opened up a whole world for me.

I have tons and tons of memories of happy 'in the kitchen' kind of memories from my childhood & even my adulthood (?).

Like the few Christmases I lived close enough to my BFF that we decided to make Christmas cookies together to give out to our families. An eight year old would be neater in the kitchen than the two of us were together, but boy we had fun & made some good cookies!

And how my Grandpop would make crepes for us when we slept over, I would lay in bed in the morning and I could hear him in the kitchen getting ready and then smell them cooking. He would make a game out of the whole thing, fly them through the air like flying saucers, make them with 'arms' so they were monsters, etc. They were soooo good, and I could put as much syrup as I wanted on them. ;-)

I don't have any one recipe that wins out over the others, just a realization that I have many, many happy memories of cooking & eating with family and friends through my whole life. And I have to say, I'm happy about that.

Great idea for a contest - it's brought back some good memories!