Saturday, October 29, 2011

Marks of Success

About a year ago I took an interest in cooking.  It turns out that I'm pretty good at it.  I have a good instinct for it.  It's been a ton of fun building my own cookbook and trying new recipes.  I love planning menus and organizing the grocery list so that I have a plan when it comes to dinner every night.  I feel like I am doing something good for my family as well as for our household.  It's funny how what I see as being a success was one of the trappings my own mother and especially her mother broke free from.  Grandma was a professional woman.  In the 40's darned few women went back to work after having children.  Usually if a women went back to work after she had kids, it was because, for some reason, her husband couldn't or wouldn't support the needs of the family.  With Grandma, that wasn't the case.  I mean sure, they struggled through the depression like everybody else, but Grandpa had a pretty good nest-egg stashed.  Grandma didn't cook much.  I remember a few breads and things, our joke was always that our favorite family recipes could be "found on the back of the box" of brownies, or cake or whatever.  In a lot of ways, to a lot of people, Grandma had made it.  She had a good marriage, family and a career.  My own mother was a stay at  home mom, but she was really involved with a lot of things and rarely stayed at home on any given day.  She was a lousy cook.  To be very honest, I don't even think she really enjoyed what she cooked.  I think "eatable" was really her highest goal in cooking.  She had one cookie dough recipe she used for everything.  It had variations for peanut butter cookies, chocolate chip, and sugar cookies.  It was the only recipe she ever used to make cookies.  Ever.  She tried lots of new recipes.  But in the end, while mom was good at a lot of things, cooking wasn't one of them.  It was never a priority for her.  She had other things she wanted to spend her time on.  It's funny to me to look at how the marks of success change.  My grandmother "got" to work and didn't cook.  Just a couple of generations later I "get" to stay home and love cooking.  I wonder what my daughter will do.  :)

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