Nana's Neighborhood

A family cooking guide!

Family hands work together to do the cooking!

For the past 20 years, I have been carrying on about writing a family cookbook. I just could never find the time, energy or opportunity to get myself started. I come from a large family, of immigrant parents of differing cultures. Add to that my travels around the world and various cooking classes in Europe and Asia and I find there is a large recipe base in my head. When my children became adults, I did manage to write a cookbook for each of them including each of their favorite family recipes but just couldn’t focus on the family cookbook.

Years went by, I promised, unpromised, attempted to begin and still no motivation. Then, I was watching a popular cooking show on TV!  AND, they presented a recipe consisting of poaching eggs in tomato (pasta) sauce as a NEW approach to eggs!!! WHAT, Are YOU Kidding??? We had that when there was no pasta or meat! We were given that with homemade crusty bread!

I became energized. I wrote day and night, night and day, annoyed anyone within cooking distance. I bored my friends to tears. I dragged my nieces and nephews to the stove, which really wasn’t that difficult since I had been teaching them family recipes for years. My children and grandchildren thought I had gone nuts! Did we not have enough cookbooks?? I had to drop all the work on other books and get to work. It consumed me for 4 months. My sister-in-law edited, my daughter, Sara reviewed recipes. I had tasters from the family search their taste buds for remembered tastes from the past. We had heated family discussions regarding ingredients!  And, finally the book was finished.

Then the discussion over the cover, why I hadn’t thought of that! I was writing, I was cooking. Well that was finally solved, Nana’s Neighborhood, A family cooking guide! was done. It was edited, printed, edited again, finally printed and self-published.

There will probably be a second one to fill in the gaps but only the stars know when that will be. There is a sequel of sorts to Nana’s Cooking Guide, it is an idea my grandson had. He wanted to know about flour. So our time is spent between the peach cookbook and the flour book which will be titled Flour, Water and Such! Watch this blog for entries on the flour cookbook.