My mother is an amazing cook.
Not a good cook, a GREAT cook.... "every little thing she does is magic"....
She is literally amazing, I have never in my life tasted anything bad that came from her kitchen.
I grew up in Mexico surrounded by fresh produce from the farmers market, fresh bread from the "panaderia", tortillas made from scratch daily.... you never saved old tortillas unless you planned to make "totopos" or "chilaquiles"(will explain later)... Anyway my point is that never in my life did I think that those simple things from daily life would be the ones I missed the most when I became an adult and moved very far away from my country.
Of course I miss my family, and my friends the most... but the one things that can take me back there without having to travel is cooking... See like most cultures Mexican life in its entirety revolves around one thing; FOOD.
I know this is very common in all cultures but the only one I know is the Hispanic culture, and I truly know it... I spend the first 20 years of my like in Mexico, and no matter how I live my life now (somewhere in the US) I will always feel like a foreigner, and I don't find this to be a negative connotation... I am foreign, I am proud of it, you cannot control the circumstances in life that brought you here.. but you can always hold on to who you are, and while I'm here in this new country that I do love I am still a foreigner....
These thoughts motivated me to start this blog... I love cooking and I feel I share a tiny bit of my moms cooking ability, I learned all I know from her and I wish I could talk to my teenage self and tell her to stop wasting time watching TV and actually pay attention to what mom is cooking in the kitchen .... I would be such an awesome cook today... But oh well, I gotta do the best I can with what I got....
I try to cook homemade meals everyday... My husband is a food vacuum and will eat anything I put in front of him, I love him for that. He never criticizes any of my meals and he is always bragging to other people on how good my cooking is..(I naively believe he is absolutely right)... I invent new meals, cook my moms recipes, follow recipes from magazines or classic cookbooks I have in my collection. But I realized that I don't have any record of my inventions, or even my family classics...
My mother has never followed a recipe in her life and cannot tell you quantities of ingredients or instructions to follow... she follows her instinct: taste, smell, look... she can tell when something ready even if shes nowhere near the kitchen... again she's amazing.
I want others to enjoy her magic through my American version of her recipes... I say American because Im using American ingredients in lieu of not being close to a Hispanic supermarket... and very very far from Mexico. But I try to stay true to my mothers advice... I hope someone out there can enjoy these recipes and have patience with my craziness...
