Since I have also danced the same dance with many of the same recipe cards and cookbooks, I am intimately familiar with the notes, the tune, the words and this song vibrates quietly in my head everyday.

This love song is a song that never ends and threads its way through our family as surely as any other attribute passed down through genetics. It is a part of our family’s genome.

Food and cooking are so complicated in our family because the process and the results are so firmly wrapped up in the definition of who we are. I hum and sing quietly as I cook. I use a spatula for our great grandmother’s kitchen every day. I hear the echoes of her kitchen in mine every time I use my standing mixer.

Our family always makes sure no one leaves the table hungry. That food taken to friends, neighbors those in need or grief will wrap them in our own version of therapeutic hugging.

Thank you for reminding of the song and the glory of cooking. Not the chore. Not the OMG what’s for dinner? But the joy, the love, the glory the family.