There’s a story in all this

When my mom passed away amongst the things that we found buried in a drawer deep in her desk was a journal. She had started it around the time that she got diagnosed with colon cancer. The first entry was dated September 11, 1992 which would have put me at the age of 14, a Freshman in high school.

She had only written a few pages and some of it was just stream of consciousness thoughts. At the bottom of one of the pages was written in her (perfect) cursive handwriting, “There’s a story in all this.”

She died in March 2023, but, she was gone way before that due to Alzheimers. In the year and a half since she died I have repeated that phrase, “there’s a story in all this” to myself many times. I got it tattooed on my arm (exactly as it was handwritten in her journal) as a reminder. Sometimes when I am navigating a tricky situation (there have been many since her death) I find myself rubbing the spot on my arm.

The other thing about my mom, aside from being a 1/1 human being (teacher/philanthropist/etc.), is that she was an expert level cook. There wasn’t a holiday or special occasion that went by that she didn’t roll out a massive spread. When my husband and I first started dating, he marveled at the level of thought and preparation that she would put into a random weeknight dinner. “There are always choices!” he would proclaim and then as we left he would look at me and tell me about the “food hangover” he was going to have later in the evening.

I did not get the gene that involves being a gourmet cook. I do enjoy a good meal, but, by nature I am a lazy person. I don’t particularly like dealing with meal prep and more times than not if we have people over it is going to involve a catering order from somewhere local. My mom was a fine china lady and I lean more into the “whatever is easiest” vibe.

When she died, it took me awhile to dig into her belongings and the contents of her computer. Once I did, I found a binder hand typed with family recipes that she compiled in 1982 and distributed to family members. On her hard drive there was a file titled “recipes” and it turned out to be hundreds of different things she saved.

I have struggled since her Alzheimer’s diagnosis (and eventual death) to make sense of a lot of things. I have told friends a million times, “one day when I write my book about all this…”.

Over the past few months, I decided it would do me good to find a new creative outlet. So, that brings me to this new endeavor which I am calling “Cooking With My Dead Mom.” I am going to attempt to cook the recipes from her 1982 recipe binder and computer files and blog about it. There will likely be stories to go along with the recipes that I remember from my meals at her house. There will definitely be (many) tears and a lot of kitchen fails.

Here we go. Let’s do this.