Find Your Comfort

Things are going well on the academic front. I'm progressing steadily through my school work, and so far I'm able to balance work and school (and life) fairly well. The true test of my ability will come when I dive into my first three-unit class at the end of the month. Until then, I'm floating in a bubble of confidence because I'm able to get through what I should, when I should, and how I should. And maybe that's done on purpose so that you have that confidence when the rest of your classes do finally start.

I started thinking more about food and why I chose to add this other aspect into my blog. Why post and share recipes? What about sharing recipes appealed to me so much? I realized that food is my comfort. It may not be the healthiest of things (especially since I love making desserts), but there it is. I have so many memories of food, and a lot of my culture on both sides of my family is celebrated with food.

Let me give you some family history. My dad was born and raised in Sweden. He met my mother when he came to the US to visit his cousin who was marrying my mother's sister. The way my mother tells it, my father was no more than a skinny boy the first time she met him. It wasn't until he returned years later that my parents fell in love. My mother comes from a very Italian family. My great-grandparents settled in the area where my family still lives now, and raised my grandmother and her brothers during the eras of prohibition and the Great Depression. My family has a very, shall we say, colorful history from that time.

Because of these strong and much-celebrated cultures on both sides of my family, we would usually celebrate the big holidays twice. We would have Swedish Christmas on Christmas Eve, and Italian Christmas on Christmas Day, allowing both parents and sets of grandparents to celebrate the holiday with their traditions and with our family.

Years went by, and my grandparents passed away one by one, but still we hold to these traditions. I started to become more involved in the cooking for our holidays for both sides of the family. It had become very important to me to help out and learn the various recipes; I didn't want these traditions that I loved so much to go away. I started out small by helping with the Swedish meatballs, and slowly worked up to being able to do them on my own. Now, I can put together the whole Swedish Christmas julbord myself (which I had to do one year when my father was in the hospital). As for the Italian Christmas, my grandmother would make homemade raviolis from scratch every year until the day she died. All the ladies on my mom's side of the family (and me of course) keep this tradition alive by making the raviolis, just like Gramma did, every year in November. It has become a labor of love.

Perhaps that is why food is my comfort--because cooking is a comfort. Every time I'm in the kitchen, I always think about Gramma and Farmor (my two grandmothers). Both of these wonderful women were expert cooks, and I feel as though they passed some of that on to me. I miss both of them terribly, but in the kitchen they don't feel so far away. The kitchen is their domain that I am now sharing. Somehow, I know they're watching me putter around with my mixing bowls and my cutting boards and my frying pans, and they approve.

Cooking is my comfort, and I will use that to help center myself in the next few years when things get rough, when deadlines are imminent, and when I need a moment to step back and take a break. Everyone should find their comfort for those times when life gets to be too full, too chaotic, too much. What's yours?