In the Beginning....

In the beginning there was a family of five with a Dad that worked and a Mom that stayed at home.  In that immaculate house there was always food.  Not just food, great food.  Mom loved to cook and did so with gusto almost every day.  On the weekends there were a lot of parties and even more food.  Speaking for myself, as the youngest of the three children, growing up in a house where there was always good food to be had, it set a precedent about what type of food to expect.

I always knew, though I don't know why or how, that I came from a long line of women who could and did cook.  My mother took cooking classes and amazed the family with her new culinary skills.  My sister would bake goodies galore for the football team.  My grandmothers cooked.  My great-grandmother in the panhandle of Texas would order my mother around the kitchen and give very specific instructions on exactly what cuts of meat to buy at the supermarket (usually to my mother's chagrin).  Again, the food was always really good.

I loved to help my mother cook though by her standards my age guaged my ability to help.  Being intimidated of cooking was never a thought that entered my head, or I believe my sister's.  Cooking was just part of life and if you were going to eat then the food needed to be worth eating. 

In high school I started preparing basic standard family fare.  In college, having memorized my father's American Express number, I would go to the grocery store after watching Great American Chefs, Great Chefs of Europe or perusing my mother's extensive cookbook collection.  I would make some of the dishes I had just watched or read about and serve the food to my parents.  Yes, Daddy was always angry until he ate the food, but fortunately for him my schedule didn't allow me to be creative very often.  The only dish I remember making from that time was a risotto stuffed portabello mushroom that had him almost in tears. 

A lifetime later and my parents call both my sister and I fearless cooks.  We'll usually try anything though our talents vary.  My sister's gift is being able to open a cupboard and say, "These 6 ingredients will make an amazing dish" and she's always right.  My talent was not being afraid of any recipe, no matter how involved or time consuming.  I like the challenge of a thing and even if it's a disaster I'll usually give it a whirl.  I vary my recipes from there though if something has the real potential of being good but it's just missing something key I always send it to my sister to play with knowing she will always come up with the solution. 

However it's not just my mother, sister and I that are the cooks.  My sister-in-law is quite gifted and my neice seems to be pretty fearless herself.  While the great-grandmothers and grandmothers are no longer with us there are five women in this family who can definitely feed the masses excellent nosh, thus this blog.

We have an idea in the family that if we make something really good then we'll share the recipe with each other.  Unfortunately we all lead very hectic lives and that's not always possible.  What I hope to achieve here is a place for us to share together, when we do have time, and invite those family members and friends that find out we're doing this and want to get involved in the recipe sharing.  In other words, this is the family cookbook. 

The fun thing is that we each have radically different tastes.  Mom thinks a lot of the food I cook is too involved, my sister and neice make things with mushrooms and olives both of which I detest, but variety is the spice of life.

The core of our cooking comes from the same scrapes of paper, shared generation to generation, and Mom's old cookbook collection.  As we've each grown and experienced life, what we cook within our own little family units has increased that collection.  I hope that here is where we will pull it all together. 

As Mom begins to organize a lifetime of recipes from our grandmothers and great-grandmothers and her own handwritten notes I've launched this blog for us, the women of the Sullivan family.  I've set this up so that the five of us can post receipes.  We are the Spicy Sullivans after all and as we increase the family recipe cannon, and as Mom captures the history of our food, we can share, here, together.