My graduation project relates to the four seasons. In our family , seasonal
food recipes were passed down from my great grand parents to my mother.
I thought it would be a good idea to ask my mother to share them with me. The
project consists of four recipes of each season, fall, winter, spring, summer.
It will include pictures of some of the recipes, and a interview with my mother
about where they came from.
I choose this topic because I wanted to learn more about my culture, and I
wanted to preserve these recipes for my children and their children. I have been
cooking with my mother since I was a little girl in our kitchen and I will be thrilled to
pass these recipes and Storys of our culture to my family one day.
You can pretty much tell what season of the year it is by walking threw our
kitchen. My mother was raised with a variety of food styles. My grandma did most of
the cooking. Her mom passed away when she was nine. So grandma relied on her older
sisters to teach her her recipes. Grandma was Irish so most of our Irish and American
dishes come directly from her. My grand pop was Ukraine. His mom died when she was
99. , so my mom was very heavily influenced by Ukraine peasant food. Finally, my mom
worked her way threw college as a sous chef, in local restraunts.
I prepared this project over the summer and I learned how to shop for the right
foods, prepare them, and then cook them with the help of my mother. It taught me
how to use the tools in the kitchen, and make these different interesting kinds of
dishes while teaching me about my heritage.
I relied on my mothers recipes as resources as well as her cultural stories. The
materials that I utilized were of course the many different foods that I prepared.
The most difficult or challenging part of the project was the time investment. I
could hardly wait for some of these dishes to cook! Also, there were different
techniques used to cook some of the dishes. Holubki for example, involved steaming
an entire head of cabbage, coreing it, par cooking the meat and rice filling, wrapping
the filling in indivual cabbage leaves to put into a cabbaged lined pot to steam. This is
not a usual cooking method employed in the microwave millennium.
I believe that this project is special because it is something that stems out of my
family and can be passed on to my children. It seems that my culture is wrapped up in
food. And these are recipes that you can’t get out of any cookbook. They are straight
from the heart.
I choose a visual of the Ukraine flag; because of what it represents the colors
are blue and yellow. Blue for the sky, and yellow for the wheat. Even the Ukraine flag
has something to do with food! Ukraine food is peasant food. They use a lot of root
vegetables cabbages pork and precious little seafood. The flag relates directly to the
culture and the culture is all about the food.
I would have liked to have had a larger kitchen or more burners on the stove
because four burners didn’t seem to be enough. I hope to be able to use these recipes
for the rest of my life.