DIY is Sharing with Others

By Rainy

When I first had laid out plans for my DIY from scratch blog, I figured it was a topic that interested me and maybe a few friends. When you are in your own kitchen alone you feel like an island creating wonderful things without an audience. If I am especially proud of a home cooked meal, I would post a picture on Facebook and pound my chest saying “Isn’t my food awesome!” Once you eat a meal, it is gone never to be shared again. It is kind of a sad thing because it probably was that awesome and should have been shared with the entire world.

Mushrooms and onion white sauce on linguine, it was really tasty!

After the first few blog posts, I began remembering that sharing recipes and homemade crafts is a very old tradition. I often use recipes from my mom and close friends. The new part is sharing it with not just friends and family but also with strangers all over the globe. Food is a basic ingredient of life. There is not many other things that are as universal as cooking a family meal.

My mother has been showing me how to make things from scratch since I was young; as all good mothers do. Starting with how to make crochet single chains with only my fingers and slicing bananas into orange juice, up to sewing a Halloween costume and baking the family’s lasagna recipe, Mom would show me the way they use to do things when she was young. But most of the projects that came all from scratch are from my grandmother’s era.

My Mom’s generation may know how to whip up a nutritious meal with Shake-N-Bake and a can of Cambell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, but it seems that the desire to create quality meals has gotten lost in the rapid pace of our modern lives. My Grandmother’s generation, having survived the depression, used raw ingredients: butter, flour and a whole chicken (giblets and all) to feed family. It is easy for us to envy the 50’s when mothers created dinner for their families with simple and flavorful foods. We are now living the opposite, consuming fast food engineered by “food scientists” with very little flavor. It is a popular now to do it yourself or make it from scratch because store bought is the norm. Creating it yourself is a luxury.

Once I let everyone know that I enjoy creating things, it seems that everyone else had a recipe or a favorite produce they wanted to share. (I even got my first random blog follower, domestic diva, M.D.). Blog topics are easy to come up with when others are coming to me with homemade food ideas. And I really want to try them all.

I’m not always going to blog about just food, but it is an easy focus. I also enjoy cross stitch, crocheting, gardening, training my dog to do new tricks, and writing. Any project that involves creativity, hard work and experimentation is fodder for DIY from scratch.

There use to be a television advertisement for a prepackaged frozen meal that sarcastically states: Chopping and pealing can be kind of relaxing at the end of the day. “Yeah, it is,” I would usually answer back. Why would I prefer frozen little food pellets to freshly cleaned and chopped ingredients. With all the chaos of the work day and driving around, it is a great feeling to spend an hour in the kitchen creating something tasty. It is an even greater feeling to sit down and eat it all.