Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
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My grandma’s love of cooking and baking did not pass through the generations to her granddaughter.
To my grandma, cooking and baking mean family, connection, community, joy and a deep sense of care for her dozens of grandchildren. It means bringing people together at small-town festivals through a shared love of baked-from-scratch apple pie and thanking community volunteers with an after-event pot roast.
As her single, elder millennial granddaughter, cooking and baking mean effort, panic, vegetables, obligation, dishes, chaos, fire alarms, scavenger hunt grocery trips, warding off a hungry cat and leftovers rotting in the fridge.
A glimpse into meals throughout my adult life reveal store-bought pasta sauce, prepackaged and processed foods, post-work stops at the local Subway, a pandemic experimentation with delivery prepared dinners, Pillsbury premade, presliced cookie dough and store-bought frozen pizzas thrown into the oven.
I’ve discovered that gifts of home baking show love and trigger sweet nostalgia
Having recently celebrated a milestone birthday, I decided it was time. With the guidance of my life coach, I dipped my finger into the batter of home cooking.
Together, we mapped out steps to turn my vision into reality, through a process apparently known as “action priming.” It turns out that basic behavioural change is quite a lot of work.
Grocery shopping days were planted in a recently purchased planner. As were supplementary purchase ideas, such as freezer bags, lest my efforts be palatable enough to save. A plan to share after-the-fact foodie photos for momentum and accountability was set. A reward system involving stickers and checkmarks was established.
So began my home cooking journey.
I pulled out a never-before-opened cookbook my sister bought for me as a birthday gift a year and a half earlier, with its accompanying personalized message: “The title is ‘super simple’ recipes, so please try to make something.”
Grocery store trips became expeditions to find the most basic ingredients, something I quickly discovered my cupboards were lacking. (Apparently, baking muffins requires flour, baking powder, baking soda and sugar, among several other things.) Utensils, pots and pans acquired many years earlier when I moved into my condo were finally unpackaged.
Lessons were learned the hard way, such as the necessity of cleaning the bottom of the oven on a somewhat regular basis to avoid triggering the fire alarm, and “pickle brine” is the juice inside the pickle jar as well as an item that can be purchased separately, and incorporating multiple specialty cheeses in a single recipe is an expense I will never recover from.
Months passed. Recipes were trialled and errored.
My home-cooking adventure began and continues with a goal of one new recipe (approximately) a week. It simply isn’t possible to go from zero to Martha Stewart overnight.
One kitchen appliance has always been by my side (and lasted longer than most relationships)
A few signs of progress and growth: I now have four different types of salt in my pantry (I never realized there was more than one). The cookbook my sister bought me has a friend. The photo folder and tracking document I began to reflect on my cooking journey is up to 24 home-cooked recipes and counting. An entire note pad has been all used up for grocery list purposes.
I’m learning that some recipes are roadmaps to be followed while others invite (minimal) experimentation and my own unique flavour.
Favourites so far include garlic butter ramen (which I’m proud to say I have made several times already), everything bagel salad, golden butternut squash soup, coconut banana muffins, chicken tortilla soup, salsa verde breakfast tacos, butter roasted tomato soup, and potato and burrata pizza (and yes, potatoes on pizza are delicious). Each of these recipes baked in a sense of accomplishment, competence, structure, mindfulness, agency and creativity that I hadn’t anticipated when I blew the dust off my first cookbook.
And they opened new doors.
Wanting to take my cooking and baking to the next level, I signed up to volunteer with a local church that cooks and bakes for hundreds of precariously housed folks in my community. During my first shift making batches of chili with five of the loveliest humans you will ever meet, a long-time volunteer asked me if I was a good cook. “No,” I said, “but I’m trying really hard to learn.”
She smiled. “Well, after this shift you’ll know how to cook for 200 people!”
Kitchens are steeped in nostalgia. The sights, tastes, sounds and smells of cooking and baking evoke memories and unite generations.
My grandma’s tiny dessert mice with their licorice tails and decorative eyes, her always made-from-scratch apple, pear and pumpkin pies, her creamy cucumber salad, her homemade jams of every flavour, her signature cheesy potato hash browns and her Easter Jell-O eggs are my favourites. I carry memories of those dishes with me and they shape my own cooking journey.
My kitchen is not my grandma’s. But the joy, creativity and humour in the trial and error of experimenting with ingredients, flavours and aromas now connects us.
Rebecca Wagner lives in Waterloo, Ont.