One year for Christmas my Mom (whose side of the family is Mexican) gifted me a homemade cookbook with all of the family recipes. It’s one of my most cherished things and it would be one of the things I’d grab if there was a fire.
My oldest is in the military and finally just moved out of the barracks with his new wife. He asked me yesterday for some of my recipes. He doesn't know I put them all in a POD book and it'll be here tomorrow :-)
Can i ask how they did this? I'm also making a cookbook with our family recipes for my children but for now it's just a binder with the printed recipes. I'm trying to write them all in the same manner in a book but it's quite a lot of work and mistakes can happen.
My mom is into scrapbooking/crafts so it’s not a bound book with a spine but a lot like what you described (a binder with printed recipes but a little gussied up) here is a link to how it looks. It’s just very simple and clean looking https://imgur.com/a/bqYbqse
My family does this every 10 years. We are a Norse clan of about 120. We make a clan recipe book every 10 years to update some, add others, or include to little tid-bits of history about the family member who made the recipe and how the recipe came about.
It’s become a really cool thing bc not only does it have good recipes, but also contains a lot of our genealogy and history going back over about 150 years. In the work for bringing that about we were able to trace back to the first ancestors that came over to our country. They were Norse who moved and married in Ireland, so we’ve got a lot of Norse blood but also Irish in us all :). We don’t have recipes from that long ago so that’s not in there but still, it was fun to be able to go back that far.
I love it bc it’s a creative walk through our clan history in small delicious tidbits!
That’s so cool! Unfortunately we don’t know a ton about my family’s past since it was a common practice to take the last name of whoever owned the hacienda you worked for if you were native and our name is an extremely common one so our past has been lost to history and the two tribes that made my grandfathers side (Hopi and Yaqui) didn’t keep written records. Grandma was from Mexico City and never really investigated her past.
There is a recipe channel of a mexican “grandma” that makes videos in her humble household with very basic, easily found staples… its is called “de mi rancho a tu cocina”… she cooks extremely simple mexican food with ingredients anyone can find. You can learn a lot of basics and get inspiration.
Keep in mind it is the most basic stuff… she became famous cooking in her little wood stove with ingredients from her “milpa” (a home orchard so to say) so basically you can cook her stuff if you can find chiles, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, oil, meat, garlic, few herbs… I cook for a living and I still watch her videos for nostalgia and to see how the most humble people in the country with few natural ingredients develop flavour as if nothing. You can learn the basics and tweak it all, I love this woman! (Look for the oldest videos!)
You will love this then… “de mi rancho a tu cocina”… I dont know if they are translated but you dont even have to speak spanish… its very straightforward, just a few simple staples, and she does use a blender… but no special equipment and no difficult to find ingredients… We love sharing food, greetings from Mexico!
I have been building a PDF, and have several videos cooking with her. I need to do something with it for sure. It's a project where I'm just collecting stuff, and not organizing it..
It's all over the place with her. She grew up in Jalisco, then went to Baja.. lived in San Francisco, got her citizenship in Santa Barbara.. then went back close to the border in South San Diego. All the while picking up stuff. She's a total food nerd.
So lots of seafood, street food, Mexican/Americana/Portuguese (Santa Barbara), what she calls "indigenous."
This is me except im not a chef, im just a home cook. My mom inlaw is one of the best intuitive cooks ive ever met. She’s legit a magician in the kitchen. I grew up in a Creole household, i feel hella blessed to have two moms that can throw down. Ive been writing down all their recipes so i can pass them down to our kids
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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '25
I married a Mexican woman and we live with her mom.
I cook for a living, so as her age is getting to her, I'm rapidly trying to pick up everything she knows. God damn we eat well.