I will never forget the day my grandma handed me my first cookbook. It was a day full of sweet irony. Growing up, I had always wanted the traditional everything. I wanted the traditional home with mom and dad. I wanted the family-cooked meals and sit-down dinners where everyone gathered around and shared about their day. I wanted the grandmother who would bake cake and cookies for her grandchildren and say things like, “Shhh, don’t tell mom!”. Needles to say, that obviously didn’t happen.

What I got instead was a hard-working single mother who for the first 15 years of her child's life couldn’t make or make it to dinner. My mother, like her mother, didn’t know how to cook, so it was “goodbye” to home-made, family sit-down-dinners, and “hello” to frozen kid dinners in front of a TV.

Fast forward to my college years and I now found myself being the third-generation non-cooking knower (that’s a thing right?) One glorious day my grandmother found out that I was interested in learning how to cook. Having no recipes of her own to pass down, she decided to buy me a cookbook: “Mexican Kitchen” By Rick Bayless, the title read. I remember taking it back home and feeling thrilled at the possibility of finally learning to cook meals I actually enjoyed. A couple of pages later, and I see a seemingly simple recipe: Mexican Beans. “Easy!” I think to myself, “The perfect recipe for a newbie like me! Who can screw up beans?”...me, I screwed up beans.

Somehow what should have been a simple recipe asked for ingredients that I never knew existed, and didn’t realize I didn’t truly need or liked. (Hint: Epazote was one of them...yes, Google it). I was discouraged by the taste (my fault). Discouraged by the amount of time it took to make, and above all, I was discouraged at the fact that many of the additional recipes seemed way harder than what I could afford to make at the time with my limited knowledge, utensils and skills. It was back to cereal and sandwiches for me.

What should have been an event of inspiration and generational-changing of the odds, became a moment of deception and generational continuation of our inability to cook, hence...the irony. While I didn’t learn cooking from my mother or her mother or even Rick Bayless for that matter, I did eventually get caught up on how to cook and it began with 4 simple tricks my former mother-in-law would teach me (or as Debbie Silver says “practice mother-in-law”).

That was the foundation of what later would create simple, easy-to-follow recipes that she caringly put together and modeled for me. Today I look back at the frustrated beginnings of my journey with cooking and wonder how others are doing. I long to help them the way someone helped me. My goal is to start sharing simple, easy-to-follow recipes using everyday ingredients you probably already have at home. Feel free to join me!