Old School Cooking

A coworker of mine is leaving to attend graduate school for architecture, in Illinois. :-(

And don't get me wrong, I'm tremendously happy for her, she's taking the next step towards being an architect. I'm just going to miss my female buddy at work, my comrade in a sense.

So to bid her farewell, my other coworker is going to have a pot luck at her apartment since she lives nearby and has a new baby that we get to play with and make funny faces at (YAY!!). So my dish to this feast will be my family's Baked Ziti. Now, I've never made this on my own before, it's always been under the watchful eye of my mother and with the help of my sister, so this is a big deal and my first attempt to recreate a dish that I've loved my whole life.

Food is very important to me, especially family recipes like this one. It contains all of the happy memories left over from my childhood when I did have that big extended family. It's like a reminder to me about what an extended family can be and now it's a little container of hope that someday I will have a family to share my love with and my food, that I will bring to them all the happy memories that I had about what it is to have a family.

So now my Baked Ziti is resting in the fridge and will soon be baking in the oven and filling my apartment with a new wonderful scent.

(and no, you can't have the recipe) :-P