Cooking…

Dear Reader,

I can feel summer slowly creeping away in the last week. In Florida I would have been thrilled, but here in South Dakota, even though it has been so hot, I find myself clinging a little bit to summer because I know that winter is coming and it lasts longer here than summer does. I am excited about fall though and to be in a place that actually experiences it for a bit and not for three days. I am also excited to be able to wear my favorite sweaters on a regular basis.

But for now, I am enjoying the last days of summer and the fact that I do not have to go back to classes like some of my sisters. I did take a job as a substitute teacher with the schools in town, which also happens to be the county schools for all grades. I never saw myself teaching even though I have tutored and worked with siblings and cousins on their schoolwork since I was in college. I felt that subbing was an easy way to get my toes wet. I probably could have taken a full classroom, but I promised myself no big career choices for the next year.

I surprisingly find myself missing the beach less, but if South Dakota backed up the ocean it would add just that much more to the scenery. I did get to experience some of the mountains in Colorado this summer.

A few weeks ago, my family traveled to Denver to attend my cousin’s wedding. It was in a really pretty venue in the mountains out on a deck overlooking a lake. I saw family that I hadn’t seen since I was two, danced with cousins, and was brought up to speed on everyone’s life. I was not raised near my dad’s extended family so to have a room full of people with the same last name as me made me feel like not such an odd duck. Being half Mexican, but looking white, I am constantly having my “Mexican Card” questioned. Not so much by other groups, but definitely by other Mexicans, but when you are related to half of the people at the wedding, you feel pretty Mexican.

While in Denver, we got to see the mountains and some of the places that my dad grew up. It was like seeing the rock where the statue was cut from. I grew up near the same area that my mom did, and the same landscape and people shaped me. But it was interesting to see what shaped my dad and to see him feel completely at home in a place that was only stories and far off mountains to me.

After dealing with the almost non-existent South Dakota traffic, it was a bit intimidating to drive in Denver, but it wasn’t so bad after some practice. If you grow up driving on I-4 in Florida, you can almost handle anything traffic wise, unless it’s Atlanta traffic. Just like it takes a special person to love the ranch life with all of its hardships, it takes someone special to truly love and prefer to live in a truly urban area. Sometimes I think it would be fun to live in a cute little loft apartment on top of a Chinese restaurant or coffeeshop and walk to a cute little job at a bookstore, but in reality, the amount of people would drive me crazy. I feel like when you grow up in a less populated area, your standards for personal space are higher.

Back in South Dakota life goes on as normal. I am having to do most of the cooking since my mom broke her arm recently, which is an adventure for everyone. (God bless the couple from church that brought us curry the other night!) So far, I’ve gotten good at making pizza dough, though I am still working on the gluten free pizza dough. And I also getting more confident with making homemade ramen. (That was one of the things I missed the most about Florida, the easy access to Asian food.) I’ve even started saving recipes that I found on social media. Don’t expect this to turn into a recipe blog anytime soon, but I would say my cooking skills are expanding.

The cooking part isn’t actually that hard (most of the time), it’s everything that goes with it. The planning, the shopping, the prep, and the actual cooking all together that makes it a bit overwhelming, at least for me. There have been a few nights that I traded chores with one of my sisters, so I didn’t have to cook.  I told someone the other day that I enjoy the idea of being an admin wife, where I just clean and manage the house, but being the cooking wife too might be a bit much. I just kinda shove those unnecessary thoughts to the side when I think about marriage and hope my husband enjoys cooking to take his mind off the troubles of the ranch… I will gladly unload the horses when we get home.