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Who taught you to love food?
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My Abuelita's Creations
My dad's side of the family comes from the Dominican Republic. Hispanics are one of the cultures that have a stereotype for having very large families, and mine is no exception. My dad is the oldest of seven siblings, and I have about thirty or so cousins on that side.
Every Saturday growing up my whole family woud meet over at my grandmother's (Abuelita in spanish) house and enjoy the most epic dinner you will ever know. From time to time my parents or my aunts or uncles would bring a dish of their own, but usually my Abuelita did most of the cooking.
And cook she did. Abodigas, Friend eggplant, rice and beans, Pastolitos, Quiepes...the list goes on and on. Some of what she made looked our sounded, upon description, rather gross but once you were in the actual room with it and your nose stopped being worthless, you realized something: If you had died right then and there you could have gone to heaven Fully confident that you had just smelled the best thing in the entire world.
It wasn't just the smell, either, it was the taste. Her food lit up your mouth with a litany of flavors. The best part is that she never actually used any sort of measuring utensils to make her food. A pinch of this, a dab of that, a scoop of this; this was her method. The sad thing about that is that now that she's gone everyone has been attempting to recreate what she had made but no one ever truly gets that close.
She passed away when I was only 8, so at the time I couldn't make much more than a really mean bowl of serial. However, she ignited a fire in me with her food for the love of food. Today, a big part of which being thanks to her, I make all sorts of creations in the culinary world. Am I a professional chef? No. Do I every now and then come up with a rather unique set of flavors that ends up tasting, shall we say, less than good? Absolutely. It doesn't matter though. Food drives a part of who I am, and a big part of that drive came from my dearly beloved Abuelita.
Every Saturday growing up my whole family woud meet over at my grandmother's (Abuelita in spanish) house and enjoy the most epic dinner you will ever know. From time to time my parents or my aunts or uncles would bring a dish of their own, but usually my Abuelita did most of the cooking.
And cook she did. Abodigas, Friend eggplant, rice and beans, Pastolitos, Quiepes...the list goes on and on. Some of what she made looked our sounded, upon description, rather gross but once you were in the actual room with it and your nose stopped being worthless, you realized something: If you had died right then and there you could have gone to heaven Fully confident that you had just smelled the best thing in the entire world.
It wasn't just the smell, either, it was the taste. Her food lit up your mouth with a litany of flavors. The best part is that she never actually used any sort of measuring utensils to make her food. A pinch of this, a dab of that, a scoop of this; this was her method. The sad thing about that is that now that she's gone everyone has been attempting to recreate what she had made but no one ever truly gets that close.
She passed away when I was only 8, so at the time I couldn't make much more than a really mean bowl of serial. However, she ignited a fire in me with her food for the love of food. Today, a big part of which being thanks to her, I make all sorts of creations in the culinary world. Am I a professional chef? No. Do I every now and then come up with a rather unique set of flavors that ends up tasting, shall we say, less than good? Absolutely. It doesn't matter though. Food drives a part of who I am, and a big part of that drive came from my dearly beloved Abuelita.
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