Love Is Spelled Leftovers: My Mother's Kitchen Legacy

There are recipes we cook for dinner, and then there are recipes that carry our whole history in them.My mom was the main cook in our house when I was growing up. Both of my parents worked, but my mom was the breadwinner, commuting downtown to Toronto, working long hours, and still somehow walking through the door late at night and pulling together a home-cooked meal for me and my older sister. My dad cooked too, but let’s just say his style of cooking leaned more toward Hamburger Helper than homemade, you know what I mean? Even exhausted, my mom somehow managed to create dinners so good that I still cook them today. When she passed away when I was 14, those recipes became something much bigger than dinner, they became pieces of her I could keep forever, a way of holding on and a way of sharing her with my kids. One of her favourite things to do was to make enough food for leftovers. I’m talking copious amounts of food that there was no way were going to be able to finish in one sitting. Now, ten-year-old Stacey thought leftovers were a crime against humanity. The gall. The audacity! Eating...