Letter to the Extended Family

My family, on my mother's side, consists of all the descendants of my great grandmother. Shortly after she passed away my mother and aunt put together a family cookbook. While the primary goal was to preserve my great grandmother's recipes, they also accepted submissions from other family members. Many of the recipes from that cookbook have become staples and my parties and social functions. This book, and other projects like it, are a big part of what holds my (very) extended family together. So now the time has come to try to put together a second edition, and I've decided to head up the project. This is the letter that I sent out to my family to explain the project, which I hope to also use as the introduction to the second edition.

Names have been removed. For the most part they've simply been replaced with the relative's relationship descriptor.


To the Members of the Family _________,

The scions of our branch of the family met at the beach house last summer for a weekend. While there we discussed the need to create a second edition of our beloved family cookbook. "Why?" you may be wondering. "What is wrong with the cookbook we have?" Nothing is wrong with it! Well, except for the typos, outdated graphics and the occasional recipe that is simply wrong (as an example, my great Aunt's pickled mushrooms do not use pepper). But overall there is nothing wrong with it! It is certainly a better record of family culinary history than most extended families have. My personal copy has been a constant kitchen companion for as long as I've had a kitchen to use it in. Recipes from that book have fed friends and parties and have always met with raving success.

And yet, it is still woefully incomplete. Many of the recipes I grew up most directly associating with family trips and holidays weren't included in the original cookbook. Where is our Great Aunt's delicious carrot soufflé? Or our cousin's totally amazing challah? Or my Aunt's "famous" cheese tarts? These are the family recipes I long for and cherish and I would like to see them all in one place rather than scattered on recipe cards or still lacking from my recipe collection.

Of course, there would be more to a second addition than simply adding recipes that I personally feel are lacking from the first. I'm not sure when the original book was published, but I think I'm safe in saying that it was over 20 years ago. In those 20 years children have grown up, gotten married and had children of their own. They have developed and discovered their own recipes as well as married into families with their own culinary traditions. They have lived in foreign lands, and settled in distant states. And they have no doubt acquired prized dishes, college culinary experiments, and the occasional in law oddity that all deserve to be represented. When I look through my family cookbook I see very little representing my own small family, or the families of the cousins I grew up with. As our extended family extends ever farther, I feel that we need the binding element that this book provides more than ever.

When talking about community building, so much of it always comes back to food. When we talk about having friends in our neighborhood we mention about how we'll be able to "borrow a cup of sugar" from them. When planning weddings and bar mitzvahs so much of the party planning is focussed on what will be served. We understand that when we are melancholy there are certain "comfort foods" we can turn to. And almost every major Jewish holiday revolves around a festive meal (except when they specifically have us NOT eating). What we eat, and who we eat it with, are a large part of what help us create a sense of commonality. At this point, our family has spread so far and grown so large that it's unlikely we're ever going to get everyone together at one big passover seder, but just because we aren't sitting down at the same table doesn't mean that we can't be sitting down to the same foods.

And that's the goal. To create a cookbook that represents the family in it's current incarnation and allows us to all have something in common, no matter how far apart we might be or how long it's been since we last saw each other. So send us your new recipes developed or discovered as you've grown up and moved out on your own. Send us your variations on recipes from the original cookbook. Send us the staples from your in-laws' family or that crazy innovation by your spouse. And send us your old classics that some how escaped publication and all the minor corrections that have been lingering unfixed for over 20 years.

I can't wait to see them all!

anie

Real Housewife of Atlanta

Hi, I'm Anie. I've decided to start a blog about my life. I'm not sure if anyone will want to read it, though. I mean, my life is pretty normal and straight forward. I got married at 23 to my highschool sweetheart. We bought a house in the city three months later. He has a salaried job and I work super part time (about 15 hours a week) just to give us a little extra grocery money. He pays the bills, I wash the underwear.

On Friday night we light Shabbat candles and have a nice dinner. About every other weekend we're joined by our boyfriend and girlfriend and their boys. We spend dinner trying to keep the kids from blowing out the candles and then we head out to our local vampire LARP (Live Action Role Playing game). Usually mom and the boys will hang out for half an hour to an hour. Then they go home and go to bed while the rest of us play until two in the morning. After game, a handful of friends (somewhere between two and five) come back to our place to spend the weekend.

Saturdays are spent with the kids going to the park, friends hanging out on the porch, and lots of computer games. Until nightfall, when it's time for another LARP. Sundays are for walking around the neighborhood and sad goodbyes. Then it's back to the grind of another work week in which my darling husband will leave me with a To Do list that I will never quite finish.

Weekends with out games are usually more low key. Most of the time there's some party or club event scheduled, which will give my boyfriend a reason to come to town. I'll put on my party clothes and he'll put on his nice collar and we'll go out to have some fun. Often the husband comes along as well. Living in the city, we can usually come up with a few different options for entertainment, though Sunday nights still usually find us at home watching television shows on Netflix.

Passover is spent with my mother's extended family here in Atlanta. Easter is the big holiday for my husbands family, but it's pretty open invite so this year we brought our boyfriend and girlfriend along, too. Thanksgiving we usually travel to South Carolina to stay with my parents and go see my Dad's family. We don't tend to stay long, however, because a friend here in Atlanta hosts a big Friends and Family feast the Saturday following that we like to be back for (if only to recreate the holiday with the [gender]friends and their kids). Christmas is complicated, but seems to have settled into a compromise with my family coming to Atlanta and us doing Christmas Eve for my dad. Then we all head out for the in-law's big todo on Christmas Day. Unfortunately, it happens at the same time as the girlfriend's family's todo, but we all managed to get together afterward for some quality family time. Maybe this year we'll see if people can shuffle their schedules around a little, but probably not.

Of course there are other key events in the year. Our LARP is part of an international organization, and we host an event every March. Then there's always Dragon*Con in September (which served as our honeymoon one year). Somewhere around January or February we tend to travel to Milwaukee for their event game. And this year we're talking about both New Orleans and Israel. It seems like there's always something coming up that we need to save our pennies for. Luckily, we all seem to get along well on long car trips and in cramped hotel rooms.

Really, I guess that's my life. I admit, the house isn't nearly as clean as it should be for someone with nothing else to do with her time. And the laundry always tends to get done minutes before we run out of clothes. And juggling all the various families and faiths can get complicated, not to mention budgeting in the trips and cons. But my home is full of love and happiness and parties and people and even a few whips and chains just to keep everything in line. All in all, it's just a normal, boring life. But maybe you'll enjoy reading about it anyway. I hope you do!