I find myself thumbing through cookbooks, jotting down recipes from shows on T.V., and pinning endless amounts of recipes on Pinterest. I plan, I make lists, and then I enter the grocery store. And more often than not, I find myself gravitating back to the recipes I’ve been cooking for years. The food I ate as a child, the meals I watched my grandmother cook, the dinners I dreaded my mother asking me to make.

Decades later, these same recipes of my childhood are a pleasure to prepare and make me smile as I watch my family and friends enjoy them.

As I look through my binder of recipes from the past. I see notes I scribbled as I watched my grandmother cook, recipes I copied from my mothers index cards, and recipes from friends.

I have recently come to realize the importance the “old” things in my life have become. We spend so much of our youth trying to prove that “new” things are better, more efficient, more fun. But are they? Theres a chinese idiom that says, “姜还是老的辣”. Literally translated, old ginger is spicier than young ginger. Experience counts, the older the wiser.

So I am pulling out my old, tattered cookbook, filled with decades of experience. Recipes that bring back memories of aromas, sounds and most importantly amazing taste.