Through my senior project I have focused a lot on one part of my essential question: culture and cooking, but the main part of my project is that these recipes stem from my family. Other than the interview document and cook, I wanted to think of a way I could collectively add up all of my knowledge and keep the idea of family in mind. I wanted to make a cookbook of all of my family’s recipes for me to share with my family. 

When deciding this I reflected on my junior class trip. After I had completed my work in Brownsville and my work for the actual project, I wanted to keep going. Therefore, I signed up to be a volunteer at a new Sanctuary, took James immigration class, and spent a lot of my time continuing to write about, read and study immigration and today’s immigration crisis. Similarly to that, I want to keep this project as a part of me for a long time, something that I can Continue to add to. I then came up with the idea of a cookbook. Yet, I want this cookbook to not just include recipes. I want to take the knowledge that I have collected and the stories of my family members and include them in the cookbook. I want to dedicate each page (or few pages) to each member that I have interviewed sharing their stories and their recipes to keep the ties between culture,family, and food. 

Oftentimes after interviewing my family members and hearing about the foods that meant so much to them I was a little bit disappointed that there was a huge lack of their presence in my life. Even when I would research the places where I could find them, I knew that none of them were exactly the same as the way that my family members made them. I also in research found that a lot of foods are stigmatized in a negative sentence, especially Latino foods. Feel that by creating a cookbook that I can keep in my family but also share with the people around me I can begin to destigmatize these foods.

I am also pretty creative, and want to do something involving art. Especially because I have spent a lot of my time in quarantine doing arts and crafts. I think that the cookbook would be a good and creative outlet for me to express what I have learnt and what I want to share.