A Legacy In The Making

When I first started dating my husband 14 years ago I quickly got to know his extended family and I have to say that they are a wonderful bunch of people. I consider myself extremely lucky as I know there are so many people who do not have a great realtionship with their "adopted" family but I love them. My mother in law is one of my best friends and is such an inspiration to me, I am proud to have her as my daughters grandmother.

My husbands grandmother who I affectionately call Nan is such an integral part of this family. She is 84 and up until about a year ago she was still tending to the garden each and every day and looking after her chickens. I swear she has two rules, you eat... alot and you never go home empty handed! Just so I can paint you a good picture here is a pic of Nan with my daughter.

She is a little Ukranian woman and she is absoutley amazing, she cooks like I have never seen before. She once told me the story that she had to leave her home in the Ukraine at 15 during the war and went to Germany. There she worked in a restuarant and finally immigrated over to Australia. Her recipes are a mixture of Ukranian, German and Polish food. Some she learned from the restaurant and some she learned from her mother. Though when I say her recipe there is no actual recipe and this is where the problem lies.

In the last year Nan has begun to develop mild dementia and I can see this is so frustrating for her. Because I know that her cooking is such an integral part of this family I have recently taken the opportunity to spend time cooking with her. She has been teaching me her dishes, this has been wonderful but hard at times as she does everything by feel and gets very annoyed with me when I insist on measuring!

Learning the family dishes has been fantastic, I am now learning to make the things I love and the things my husband ate growing up. I can see when we cook that she is often easily confused and I know that we need to do this more often. It is sad to say but no one has her recipes and these will be gone with her. I want my daughter to grow up with this cooking in her life and in her childrens life.

These dishes are not just food but they are memories. Today I was with her and we made her familys traditional biscuits which she calls Crushde, they are similar to Cristolis. It took us a few hours and we made over 100 biscuits and this was a small batch in her mind. She is not able to do it now but she would make at least 1000. These biscuits are made every Christmas and just the smell and taste of them takes my back to Nans traditional Christmas dinner every Christmas Eve. We all get together eat, open presents, the kids play....it really is one of my favourite parts of Christmas.

It wouldn't be Christmas without these biscuits and this Christmas all the women in our family are going to get together to make them to take the pressure off Nan.

I am sure that Nan has a good amount of time left with us but I know that she would want us to have these recipes and pass them along to our grandkids, infact she told me so today. It was so lovely today cooking with her. Just recently we were cooking with her and it was so nice as there was my daughter, myself, my mother in law and Nan and we all cooked together. It just gave me the best feeling of family.

The food is great but the family is the most important. I want to make sure her legacy lives on in our family.

Are there any dishes you should be getting the recipe for or perhaps sadly missed out on?