Even though they were years retired, three former colleagues-turned-friends decided to undertake one more enterprise. This time, however, their project is born not of business, but from traditions.
The Tucson women, Zulema V. Echerivel-Felix, Maria A. Carbajal and Patricia A. Taylor, former Hughes Aircraft/Raytheon Missile Systems executives, spent nearly two years creating a cookbook filled with family recipes as a way to honor their mothers. The result: “¡Buen Provecho! Treasured Secret Flavors.”
“We started making green corn tamales seasonally and the friendship grew from there,” Taylor said. “As you do when you are making tamales, we started talking about our mothers and grandmothers and the influence of our mothers and grandmothers. Then we started thinking, why don’t we do something because we are grateful for all the things they provided us, all the things moms do that they are not aware they are even doing.”
Although the idea for a cookbook spoke to their hearts, the plan they employed to complete the project was methodical.
“I said after I retired I wasn’t doing any more tests, no more charts, no more presentations,” Carbajal said. “Then Pat came over one day and said, ‘This is how we are going to put together a cookbook.’ And she puts up a flow chart and I said, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to do that.’ Pat is very process oriented. We were all in management. We had processes we continued to streamline and she wanted us to do the same thing using what she called systematic processes.”
The disciplined approach required the women to cull recipes passed down through their families, test each recipe multiple times for quality control and photograph the multiple steps involved in preparing each dish.
“We did a lot of cooking and we gained a lot of weight,” Carbajal said. “We had to test over and over because we were used to a handful of this and a handful of that, or a spoonful of this and a spoonful of that.”
The women wanted to explain the steps for each recipe thoroughly enough that anyone could recreate them.
“The one that owned the recipe made it for all of us, then another of us had to make that same food to see if it turned out the same way,” Echerivel-Felix said. “I took it one step further.”
To ensure each recipe was clear and easy to follow, Echerivel-Felix enlisted the help of her twin 12-year-old granddaughters.
“I gave them all the ingredients, then I walked away because I wanted to make sure the instructions were easy enough to follow,” she said.
The girls helped her refine recipes and fill in gaps in the process that she had taken for granted after preparing the same recipes for decades.
The book includes 29 recipes using red chile paste and 22 using green chile. Some of the recipes have similar names, but the end results are different depending upon who provided the recipe and from where their descendants emigrated — Chihuahua and Sonora, Mexico; Arizona and New Mexico. The book also includes 300 photos of ingredients and of recipe preparation in-progress.
Despite the systematic approach used by the women to create “¡Buen Provecho!” (which means bon appetit), 20-or-so pages in the front of the book are composed of pure love. In the dedication section readers can learn about the mothers who inspired the authors to cook and the important role food plays in their family traditions.
“It was good to publish because we could pay tribute to our moms and grandmas who taught us all this and put all the love into the food,” Echerivel-Felix said. “We thought, what a better way to pay tribute to them than the recipes that they perfected. It was about our moms and recipes and documenting them for my kids, for family and for other families that would enjoy this kind of cooking.”
