I am My Mother 2.0.
I am My Mother 2.0*. Or perhaps My Grandmother 3.0.
Case in point - cookbooks. My mother loves to cook (as did her mother) and for the most part, we are recipe-followers (not like my husband, who just throws things together, often with excellent result). We also, all three of us, are pack-rats. This means that my mom has a LOT of cookbooks.
I, on the other hand, as a Foreign Service wife who will be moving every two to three years for the rest of her adult life, with a household weight limit of 7,000 pounds, have to be careful with how many books I accumulate. I do not, on the other hand, have to be careful with how many digital recipes I accumulate. I just looked in my "Recipes to Try" folder on my computer, and it contains over 100 MB of files - most of them text or PDF files. Which is a lot of recipes. And that doesn't even count the ones in my tried-and-true recipe book.
Speaking of the tried-and-true recipe book (known as "The Book of Yum") brings me to another way I am like my mom. (Well, two ways, actually.) When I was a teenager and I was learning to cook, I started putting all my favorite recipes in a binder, because I noticed that whenever Mom wanted to cook something, there was a big hunt to try to remember what book the sought-after recipe was in. I decided to solve this by creating the BOY - everything in one place! The only problem is that I did not create the most intuitive categories, so now when I want to find a recipe, I have to search on my computer in the digital version of the BOY to find what I want.
The second BOY-related way I am like my mom is the nature of the recipes contained within it. It's approximately one half desserts - even though I have not added any new dessert recipes in YEARS. I love desserts, but I've gotten lazy about them. I really can't be bothered to bake cakes anymore. Dessert now is usually something that has only one or two ingredients - like, grilled pineapple, or fried bananas with ice cream. No recipe needed! And guess what? When Mom put together a cookbook of all the favorite family recipes for me and my sister as a Christmas present one year, it was half desserts!
And the fourth way that occurs to me, and what prompted this post: doing the dishes. It used to drive me crazy that whenever I was cooking Mom was bustling around me washing all the dishes - sometimes taking things right out from under me before I was done with them - so the dishes would be clean when it actually came time to eat. And now I do the same thing! I am boiling beans right now, and while they are boiling I washed the strainer, the cutting board, the knife, and then all the other stuff on the counter because, hey, the hot water was right there, so why not? And I'm pretty sure I do the same thing to Bill when he's cooking.
* In the sense of "updated", not necessarily in the sense of "improved".
Case in point - cookbooks. My mother loves to cook (as did her mother) and for the most part, we are recipe-followers (not like my husband, who just throws things together, often with excellent result). We also, all three of us, are pack-rats. This means that my mom has a LOT of cookbooks.
I, on the other hand, as a Foreign Service wife who will be moving every two to three years for the rest of her adult life, with a household weight limit of 7,000 pounds, have to be careful with how many books I accumulate. I do not, on the other hand, have to be careful with how many digital recipes I accumulate. I just looked in my "Recipes to Try" folder on my computer, and it contains over 100 MB of files - most of them text or PDF files. Which is a lot of recipes. And that doesn't even count the ones in my tried-and-true recipe book.
Speaking of the tried-and-true recipe book (known as "The Book of Yum") brings me to another way I am like my mom. (Well, two ways, actually.) When I was a teenager and I was learning to cook, I started putting all my favorite recipes in a binder, because I noticed that whenever Mom wanted to cook something, there was a big hunt to try to remember what book the sought-after recipe was in. I decided to solve this by creating the BOY - everything in one place! The only problem is that I did not create the most intuitive categories, so now when I want to find a recipe, I have to search on my computer in the digital version of the BOY to find what I want.
The second BOY-related way I am like my mom is the nature of the recipes contained within it. It's approximately one half desserts - even though I have not added any new dessert recipes in YEARS. I love desserts, but I've gotten lazy about them. I really can't be bothered to bake cakes anymore. Dessert now is usually something that has only one or two ingredients - like, grilled pineapple, or fried bananas with ice cream. No recipe needed! And guess what? When Mom put together a cookbook of all the favorite family recipes for me and my sister as a Christmas present one year, it was half desserts!
And the fourth way that occurs to me, and what prompted this post: doing the dishes. It used to drive me crazy that whenever I was cooking Mom was bustling around me washing all the dishes - sometimes taking things right out from under me before I was done with them - so the dishes would be clean when it actually came time to eat. And now I do the same thing! I am boiling beans right now, and while they are boiling I washed the strainer, the cutting board, the knife, and then all the other stuff on the counter because, hey, the hot water was right there, so why not? And I'm pretty sure I do the same thing to Bill when he's cooking.
* In the sense of "updated", not necessarily in the sense of "improved".