This week I have something new to share with you! I was recently accepted into a really special community of food bloggers called Recipe Redux. Each month we are assigned a theme or challenge around which we have to create a new recipe. I am so excited to be a part of this community and also to have this new source of inspiration for developing delicious, healthy, easy recipes to share with you! So this month the theme was:
Stir up some of your earliest culinary recollections. Did you stand at your grandmother’s elbow to learn to cook? Or did you learn by stumbling through a cookbook by yourself? Share a healthy recipe and the accompanying story about one of your first cooking memories.
For me, it is all about my mom. I have so many warm and wonderful memories of her cooking, about how she always welcomed us into the kitchen to cook with her (which, of course, I largely rejected). I remember her ability to make any meal feel special, her enthusiasm for trying new things, and her passion for cooking from scratch. My mom also really wanted us to be good cooks and when I was in high school she announced one day that from that moment on my brother and I were each going to be responsible for dinner one night a week. We had to plan it and cook it. I was horrified!! But I started poking around in cookbooks and making dinners, some of which were absolutely inedible! One of the first dishes that I truly enjoyed making was eggrolls. I loved the ritual of it: the creation of a filling, the rolling them just right, the frying, and then the hot crispy pockets that you got to enjoy.
But, of course, they were deep fried, so as I got more and more wrapped up in teen body image issues I rejected them and forgot about how much I loved to make them… until this challenge!…