Rooting Around

I’m on the hunt for a good recipe for lemon ricotta pancakes.

I tasted them at brunch a few weeks ago and wondered if I could replicate them in my own kitchen.

I found a recipe online and although my first attempt produced good-tasting pancakes, they were a little tough on the outside and soggy on the inside. So I’m back to searching Google for more recipes.

This is actually a pleasurable pursuit for me since I love flipping through cookbooks and looking at beautiful photos of food online.

And I'm wondering if you who are cooks and bakers feel as I do about there being something hopeful about discovering a new recipe that becomes a family tradition?

I think I got this love of recipes from my grandmother. She was an expert cook and baker and even worked in a corporate kitchen in her later years.

After she died, my mother gave me a box full of recipes my grandmother had clipped from the newspaper.

There were recipes for dishes and desserts I remember being her specialties, along with recipes I could never imagine her making or even being interested in trying so I wondered why she saved them.

Growing up I liked listening to her talk about food so sorting through the recipe clippings seemed as if I had a glimpse of her food dreams.

I think I might also get my interest in food from my dad's mother -- my Italian grandmother -- whose specialty was lemon meringue pie {maybe she made lemon ricotta pancakes too?} but since I never got to meet her I can’t say for sure.

But I have to believe I inherited some of her food genes.

For Christmas this year my mother gifted me with one of those DNA test kits where you spit in a little vial and send it off to a lab for analysis of your heritage.

She and my dad both sent their samples in and the results pretty much confirmed what they already knew about their roots, except that my mother discovered she is 3% Jewish.

This surprised her -- and the rest of our family, too, but mazel tov to her.

So after weeks of waiting, I finally got my results.

Since my mother is mostly eastern European, and my dad is almost completely southern Italian, I wondered how my heritage would shake out.

But it turns out that my DNA is equally split between my parents with a little Scandinavian thrown in for good measure.

That part of the assessment seemed a little off to me, although I've read that these Scandinavia results tend to be inaccurate, so I'm taking it with a grain of salt.

But there was no real surprise for me -- I am who I thought I was.

I like it that there are threads of all those who came before me stitched into my DNA. My foodie grandmothers, my taciturn grandfather, my book-loving dad and my vivacious mother.

And somewhere out on a branch of my family's tree were lovers of words.

Whether they wrote them or read them or spoke them, I know there were relatives who were storytellers.

But really, aren't we all?

If we're not telling our stories, we're living them.

We're hoping to make sense of our own lives as we dig up the roots of our family trees to find the stories of the past.

We're all living our small stories within the much greater story God is telling about the world and its people -- who are our ancestors -- that he created to inhabit it.

If my dad's mother hadn't died when he was very young, he wouldn't have had the influence of his grandmother in his life and would have been raised quite differently. He probably wouldn't have met my mother and maybe I wouldn't even be here.

That tragedy turned the page in my dad's family life for God to script the details for a different story for him in an astonishing way.

But then God's ways are always more extraordinary than our own, aren't they?

And they reveal his great love and tender care of us even when we can't quite see what he's doing.

So I’m still rooting around for lemon ricotta pancake recipes.

There's a newly published cookbook of Italian recipes and beautiful photos of Venice waiting in my Amazon cart.

I think I'll order it so I can write my thoughts about making pancakes. {And then I can share them with you, of course.}

After all, I guess writing and cooking are rooted in who I am.

How about you? Have you gotten your DNA results? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

I'm joining my friends at Holley Gerth's place for Coffee for your Heart.