Growing up near Santa Ana, Michelle Ramirez is no stranger to delicious food, especially coming from a lineage of talented home cooks. “Grandma Gloria’s cooking is amazing,” she says with a grin, “and my mom is a wonderful cook as well.”

Not only was the food she was brought up on delicious, but it also brought the family together. Michelle's memories of her family are punctuated with casual get-togethers over bowls of menudo and assembly lines of tamale-making.

"Those are the things I want to take away with me later in the years and make sure that someone carries them on," Michelle says. "And those dishes, in particular, are the ones [that are cooked] when the family is gathering."

With such a high bar set by her grandma’s traditional Mexican recipes and her mom’s American-style cooking, Michelle knew that learning from the both of them as an adult was going to take some work—but she’s proven that it’s never too late to ignite a passion for cooking or reconnect with treasured family traditions.

“My grandma cooks amazing Mexican food,” Michelle notes. “I don’t think I’ve ever gone to my grandma’s house and had a hamburger.” And while Michelle grew up enjoying different recipes from her mom, she’s noticed a change in her mother’s style of cooking through the years.
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“Growing up with my mom, she was an excellent cook,” Michelle explains. “We had pasta one night, chicken-fried steak another night, things like that. I think I enjoy my mom’s cooking now that I’m older because she has evolved over the years and has become a little more health-conscious and also makes more fresh, healthful meals right now, more so than [when I was] a child.”

While both her mom and grandma were well-rounded in their cooking styles, what's most special to Michelle are the family recipes that turned a meal into a gathering.

Looking back on her childhood, Michelle recalls a number of happy memories revolving around food: from family get-togethers at Grandma Gloria’s for taco night to her mom’s special prime rib dinners.

“I always had a home-cooked meal,” she explains. “It didn’t matter if we were playing sports, if we had dance, or how late we got home...we got home and we ate. It was the one time we all sat together and were together as a family.”

And today, that’s something Michelle puts into practice with her own family. “I grew up with a family that always had dinner at home and I think I get that from them,” she says. “My husband will be like, ‘We don’t need a full-on meal every night; we can eat leftovers.’ But I cook every night!”

Now with her own family to cook for, it’s Michelle’s turn to take the helm of the kitchen.

Cooking every night for her husband and three kids has garnered plenty of compliments from other parents around her who are impressed by her energy and dedication to cooking something at the end of the day. “Being raised that way, it’s just something that I do as well,” Michelle states.

“Even if we’re eating at eight o’clock at night, I’ll cook a meal. And don’t get me wrong—we have our days where we’re going to go through a drive-thru, but for the most part, it’s just part of my routine to come home, no matter what the day was like, cook a meal for my family, and we eat together.”

With two amazing women as her role models (a picture of Grandma Gloria is perched in Michelle’s kitchen to serve as inspiration), Michelle is making it her mission to learn these important family recipes to keep their legacy strong.

As a child, Michelle wasn’t taught to cook by her mother and grandmother. As she puts it, “they just kinda did it and the meals were there.” So when she and her husband first began living together, she was making a lot of “spaghetti and sauce out of a jar.”

Right away, she joined a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program as a source of local, organic produce. Every box she picked up contained beautiful produce, but she never knew what she was going to get—so she was sure to make use of Google in finding tasty recipes on how to cook this variety.

While teaching herself to cook these recipes, Michelle decided to make this part of the day an event for herself. “I would put some music on in my kitchen, pour myself a glass of wine, and start going through my recipe,” she laughs. “And I really enjoyed it! I think I just had it in me: I liked to cook and wanted to discover new things.”

Then, when Michelle wanted to throw a birthday party for her husband, she wanted the star of the meal to be Grandma Gloria’s chile verde. So, she called her grandmother and headed over to her house with a notepad and pencil, ready to learn the family recipe.

Needless to say, Michelle, as a young married woman trying to perfectly capture this recipe, was not expecting her grandma’s freestyle method of cooking. “I was thinking it was going to be ‘a teaspoon of this, a teaspoon of that, a couple of this,’ and she was just cooking. I was like, ‘Wait, Grandma, I’m trying to learn!’” she explains. “But she doesn’t use measuring spoons and all that kind of stuff!”

But she eventually learned the best way for recording her grandma’s cooking: “you just had to pay attention and remember what she was throwing into the pot...and hope you got it right.”

Today, Michelle’s gained a lot more confidence in her cooking and is proud of her recipe staples.

“I do make pretty darn good tacos like my grandma now!” she says. She lately hosted her parents for a taco dinner, and they were amazed by how tasty they were.

“My mom does tell me what a good cook I am,” Michelle shares. But her desire to learn continues to grow.

There are still a couple of Grandma Gloria’s recipes Michelle would like to master. “The two things I want to learn...so I can do for many years to come and teach my own children, is homemade menudo and tamales.”

“We make tamales as a family every year,” Michelle explains, “but how it works is that my grandma, on her own, will make the filling and the masa, and we meet up with her the next morning and it’s literally just assembling them at this point. But I want to learn how to do the whole shebang.”

Michelle wants to keep these family traditions alive and is motivated to pass them on to her children as well. And she’s seeing an interest starting to form from her youngest child, Lola.

“She definitely enjoys being with me in the kitchen and she wants to help,” Michelle says. She’ll let her daughter, who is 10 years old, help her out with tasks like stirring, chopping, and slicing. “She is curious about it all, and I welcome her as much as I can to join me.”

Michelle is also teaching her other daughter Sayla to tend to their animals and garden. “Sayla is my outdoorsy one, Lola is my kitchen one...and my son and my husband just enjoy to sit down and eat,” she laughs.

"I definitely want to make sure that these traditional foods and my grandma's cooking can be carried throughout the years," Michelle says, "that's what brings my heart to when the family was together."

So for all her fellow parents out there, regardless of their amount of experience in the kitchen, Michelle is confident that anyone can make the time to create a special meal the family can come together for.

“There’s hope for everybody!” Michelle encourages. “Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t, and the more you keep trying, you’ll get it!”  

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