Interesting conversations with extended family and friends circles triggered this weekend post 🙂
Women who know cooking and those who do not, both seem to have a few triggers that bring out their passion towards cooking! Even good ones seem to take a break once in a few years and reduce the extent of their cooking in their day to day lives, adapting to different stages they go through in life. It was interesting to see the triggers and the transformation!
mothers with young kids
When kids are young and look forward to tasty food and eating out is not an ALWAYS option. Mothers tend to enjoy the phase and start cooking (or learning to cook) wonderful dishes. It does not matter whether mothers consider themselves to be good or average chefs, their children will ALWAYS love to eat their food and look forward to their favorite, tasty and special dishes! Every child has at least a handful of “My mother’s _________ dish is the BEST in the world”. They create the benchmark about “home-cooked meal” in their minds! Every time they fall sick, they will come back to wanting the “special” food made by their mothers (irrespective of age).
mothers with kids in college/working outside of home
When kids go to college or work, and mothers miss their children (and children miss home food), mothers cook and send food over, share recipes, quick and tasty tips that suit their child and flood their inbox with foods! Some get into food-swap families where one kid’s mother cooks food for the other who lives in a different place and a local mother sends food to her child. While most days are hard and the number of recipes cooked for themselves reduces over a period of time, a new sense of cooking for self takes over slowly for mothers in this phase!
moms who become grandmoms
Any mom who has become a grandmother can relate to this! Every single dish that their kids loved when they were young, gets cooked and given to taste for the grandkids. Pampering is the norm! Anything that grandmothers missed cooking when they were mothers (decades ago)… still haunts their memories and they end up learning to cook those dishes and feed their grandchildren. If they live far away from their grandchildren, they plan their schedule over weeks and cook special items for grandchildren and ship them over. Distance no longer makes a difference – as they go all out for it!
Great Grandmothers
They share secret recipes that they would love to pass on across generations! How and when in the process did recipes become family-recipes, or secret-family-recipes passed across generations..? They ensure their great grandkids love to spend time with them and enjoy sitting and eating food with them, enjoying their childhood memories yet again! Just sitting and holding hands of great grandparents, while listening to their favorite memories and recipes makes it something both generations look forward to!
Anyone who has had the experience of being with three or four generations of mothers caring for them, is truly blessed! The volume of experience one gains by just being in their presence, listening, observing and learning, and most importantly bonding with them makes a huge difference!
From all the conversations, realized that
Absolutely true.