Cheaper than a shrink - and tastier, too

I love food.  I love to buy it .  I love to cook it.  I love to eat it.  Cooking, from the meal planning all the way to sitting down with a hot plate of whatever, is my favorite (and most effective) form of psychotherapy.  It helps me focus - if I need to stop obsessing over something, the process of preparing a dish breaks my concentration from what I was obsessing about and I come out with a different perspective.  If I'm feeling anxious, making the shopping list helps me focus my energy in the right direction. If I'm depressed, eating some good old fashioned home cooking like Mama Ryan or my Mama used to make has a way of making me feel like I'm home again; I have a sense of safety and security, and that pulls me out of the pit.

I have a cookbook that was put together by my aunt after both my grandparents had passed away.  It is full of all the recipes that I remember from my childhood, and when I first received my copy, I spend moths preparing everything I loved. Some things don't just fall together right, even if you have a recipe to follow.  It took me a long time to get my Mama Ryan's recipe for chicken and dumplings just right - the way it tasted when she made it.  Others I tweaked ever so slightly, and I think Mama Ryan would have approved; after all, most of her recipes she got from watching her own mother and others prepare.  They were never written down, just handed down to each generation.  A few years before she was diagnosed with lung cancer, I and other family members had her sit down and give us the recipes that she had always prepared from memory.  Just like her handmade quilts, her cooking was something that we would always remember her by.  Other recipes that she got from others were written down - on anything from notecards to the backs of receipts, to old Avon bags. These were all stuffed into her various cookbooks, and I was lucky enough to inherit all of them.

One of my goals in life is to have something like this to hand down to my children and grandchildren; one day  many years from now, maybe one of my grandchildren will be cooking something for their family that they learned from their mother or father, who learned it from me.