For My Sister, Mother, And Julia

I was thinking today about all of the cooking I have been doing lately this evening, and how much food impacts our daily life. I was feeling kind of sentimental and sort of emotional because I have been making a number of recipes that I grew up with as a kid. My mother was a wonderful cook, she had to be with 3/4 of a dozen mouths to feed every day, and she was a great homemaker. I was thinking about all of the times that I took her work for granted because it wasn't valued equally by society, and realized that in her after school snacks and her family dinners she instilled in me more information than any book I have ever read. It taught me about the world, and about my place in it. Her hard work allowed me the opportunity to be curious and explore the world, meeting my needs and wants for me while I played capture the fort, hide and seek, and bloody murder with the neighborhood children. Most of my childhood she kept trying to instill in me the information I would need to become an equally successful housewife and cook. I scoffed at this, but still payed enough attention that I am able to read a recipe, come up with a few of my own, and the love of good food made from scratch did eventually overtake me. Thank you Mom. By some act of destiny or fate, and only after a complete onset of malaise set in, I stumbled to netflicks and saw the preview for the movie Julie and Julia. Now, I have never been a fan of Julia Child. I always saw her cooking as complicated and time consuming as a child. I can remember watching it on Saturday mornings I think when my older sister absolutely refused to turn it off and she was a great deal bigger than I was so I lost. Occasionally she would sit me down next to her and tell me to watch the cooking show, I would and would find myself laughing when she did something or said something silly. When Julia Child died my older sister cried. She was really sad about the loss, and while I didn't exhibit the same emotional reaction that she did I did realize the contributions that she had made to my own situation in life. I fell in love with cooking by watching the food network one night. I couldn't get over the recipe that was on and after looking for it in the freezer section and in every restaurant in town realized that the only way I could eat it was to make it. I did so the next day, and when my loved ones faces lit up-including my mothers-I was hooked for life. When my oldest was baptized most of my siblings were in attendance and do you know what we did after? Something magical in my memory. We ate out, and then back at home we all made Lefse. To be truthful, I helped while my older sisters made it the way they had watched my mother make it, and then we all ate it with butter and sugar on it, and it was magical. The lefse was good, but the time spent in the kitchen with my older female relatives working toward a goal was even better. I can't help thinking that in some way that beautiful magical moment of bonding was in part brought to us by the magic that Julia Child instilled in my sister. So tonight as I sit at this computer wiping away the tears from a childhood of Good memories I am thankful for Julia Child, my mother, and my older sisters who have each left me with fond memories of being in the kitchen.