A message from the creators of this site...
Though The Chowdah Chick's website seems like an ordinary family cooking website run by an ordinary mother and daughter, there is a little more to the story of it's creation that we would like to share. So if you will indulge us for just a bit, we'll happily explain. In doing so perhaps we can inspire or give hope to others who face similar trials.
Scott's Story
It was clear by a very early age that my son was different. He never seemed interested in being with other children or taking part in normal play. We couldn't even get him to watch TV shows like Sesame Street; instead he preferred to watch cooking shows like Julia Child or Emeril. At first it was a humorous novelty that made family members chuckle but after awhile I started to realize this wasn't just a personal preference. My son was showing signs of obsessive behavior and one of his obsessions was cooking. At the age of two he could watch cooking shows endlessly but he avoided nearly everything else that children usually migrated towards. If you tried to stop him or turn off his cooking shows before he was ready, the world exploded into fits of tears and tantrums.
At first I could console and redirect him away from his obsessions but by the age of four, noise and tactile sensations like walking on grass or being hugged started to upset him. He was not the child that demanded comfort from his mother, instead, he preferred solitude. He learned to read almost as quickly as he learned to speak but when it came to writing he would adamantly refuse to even try. By six, Scott was in his own little world and though we could reason with him (in an oddly adult way) we couldn't pull his focus away from the one or two subjects he obsessed over. My arms ached to be able to hold and comfort him when he became upset but I had learned it would only make matters worse so I stood back and talked until he calmed. This is what our lives had become and it lasted through his teen years.
My son is now 23 and I wouldn't change him for any reason. I adore him. I love the intellectual conversations we have and he continues to amaze me daily but when he was a child, we struggled to understand. Today, we know that Scott has Asperger's which was unheard of back in the early 90's when he was born. This syndrome was only studied by one doctor at that time so we were forced to figure things out on our own. The public school system was a complete failure; they had no idea what to do with him because he could not behave the way they expected him to behave in a classroom setting but he was still a genius.
They tried to force us to have him drugged saying he must have A.D.D. but the symptoms just didn't fit. Fortunately our pediatrician was very supportive and refused to rush into a diagnosis just to quell the irritation of my son's teachers but he had little to offer for an explanation why my son was so different. It took years before we were able to get a diagnosis of Asperger's and still, I wonder if that really fits him because he has one thing that most Asperger's people do not; my son has a endless amount of empathy and kindness. So we continue to struggle for answers but through it all we have found little ways to adapt and overcome the daily struggles and cooking has played a major role in our success.
I will not deny the fact that when we started this journey, I couldn't cook to save my life. I, like my brother, called mom to find out how long a roast had to stay in the oven or how to boil rice without ending up with little bullets that threatened to break my teeth. My mother and grandfather were the cooks and every family event had them shuffling everyone out of the kitchen so they could whip up an amazing banquet for all to enjoy so there was no special cooking osmosis for me. I had obviously missed the instinctive cooking gene but for my son it was a language he was fluent in from birth. I became determined to learn how to speak some language (any language really) with my son and cooking was the easiest choice..
It started slowly, first with me sitting down and watching cooking shows with him mostly as an excuse to spend time in the same room but eventually I began to absorb what I was watching. Yes, it started to make sense and trust me, that's flippen amazing because I could burn water. Soon, Scott started talking to me during the show to discuss different techniques I learned ( I think he didn't bother talking at first because he knew I just didn't get it) and listening to him talk on the subject made me realize what an incredible mind my child had.
He absorbed information and facts about cooking like a sponge, his only problem was that he had no hand-eye coordination or practical experience in the kitchen so when I eventually talked him into trying to cook for the first time, it was not the smooth sailing we had hoped. I believe there was smoke and flames as well as screaming and running for our lives but in the end no one was hurt. We did have every door and window wide open to air smoke out of our kitchen and the meal resembled a cremation gone horribly wrong. It's safe to say it was a total flop but the experience, however, wasn't. Scott was laughing and animated and even looked me in the eye a few times. At one point I realized he wasn't leaping away from me to make sure he didn't accidentally touch or bump into me; he had relaxed and was genuinely having fun.
Cooking became the bridge I had been looking for that could reach into my son's isolation and gently draw him back into the real world and soon other members of my family witnessed his transformation and joined in. This one small thing...cooking, we do it everyday and it was what started to help our family make a connection with Scott but at the same time we had loads of fun and got to share lots of laughter. Everyone was learning new cooking techniques and trying new recipes, calling or texting about hilarious failures and sharing amazing successes. A flurry of emails with links to our favorite recipes and techniques started zooming back and forth between my mom, brother and myself to a point that I realized it needed to be organize and preserved like a family photo album. I wanted my son to be able to look back on it and remember all the fun we had in our kitchen together.
My first attempt was to make a family cookbook that I gave to everyone at Christmas but we added recipes at a rate that made it just too cumbersome to always add manually. Recipes were strewn all over the place so I had to find an electronic way of storing all this information which lead to my next attempt. That, unfortunately, didn't work out so well. I signed up on a very popular recipe website that shall remain nameless. They wanted money and they used our sign up as acceptance that they could use our recipes however they wished which meant posting them publicly. Now remember, I did say I wasn't the best cook in the world so we had a system where our recipes were shared and tweaked by other family members until everyone loved them. Strangers didn't know about this system, nor did they understand that these recipes and cooking in general was more to us than just instructions on the proper way to bake a chicken so when this website posted our recipes publicly, strangers would post negative comments and the trash talking caused a setback with my son. Scott is very protective of me and even though I didn't mind the negative comments (I totally accepted that I was not the best cook in the world) reading the insults or trash talking trolls that posted comments just flat out upset my son more than we expected. I realized I had to find another way to collect our family recipes that would be more within our control but still public enough that our entire extended family with all their friends, could easily access and add to them anytime they wanted.
Tadaaaa, this is where Weebly came into the picture. I have some pretty good website creation skills but other members of my family do not. Weebly was the perfect solution to our problem with it's simple tools and easy to understand instructions. Now anyone in my family can make a recipe and slap it up on the website (well ok almost anyone, my brother is still a complete boob when it comes to computers =D) so we can all enjoy them. By the way, it's ok for me to call my brother a boob because I'm his little sister and that's what little sisters are for. Obviously, I'll be expecting some sibling retaliation for it but this is nothing new around here; we are a goofy lot.
For those of you who took the time to read this, I hope I made you smile by sharing our story. I welcome your comments but ask that you keep the negative ones to yourself, Scott is still very protective of his mother lol.
This website is dedicated to my son Scott and we give an open invitation to anyone who wants to join in and contribute as long as everyone understands that this is more than just a group of recipes; it's a labor of love that has built a bridge of trust between my son and the world. Scott is still very much the genius in the family and he continues to amaze us all but when he comes for dinner at my house, I get a hug and I owe that little miracle to cooking.
Scott's Story
It was clear by a very early age that my son was different. He never seemed interested in being with other children or taking part in normal play. We couldn't even get him to watch TV shows like Sesame Street; instead he preferred to watch cooking shows like Julia Child or Emeril. At first it was a humorous novelty that made family members chuckle but after awhile I started to realize this wasn't just a personal preference. My son was showing signs of obsessive behavior and one of his obsessions was cooking. At the age of two he could watch cooking shows endlessly but he avoided nearly everything else that children usually migrated towards. If you tried to stop him or turn off his cooking shows before he was ready, the world exploded into fits of tears and tantrums.
At first I could console and redirect him away from his obsessions but by the age of four, noise and tactile sensations like walking on grass or being hugged started to upset him. He was not the child that demanded comfort from his mother, instead, he preferred solitude. He learned to read almost as quickly as he learned to speak but when it came to writing he would adamantly refuse to even try. By six, Scott was in his own little world and though we could reason with him (in an oddly adult way) we couldn't pull his focus away from the one or two subjects he obsessed over. My arms ached to be able to hold and comfort him when he became upset but I had learned it would only make matters worse so I stood back and talked until he calmed. This is what our lives had become and it lasted through his teen years.
My son is now 23 and I wouldn't change him for any reason. I adore him. I love the intellectual conversations we have and he continues to amaze me daily but when he was a child, we struggled to understand. Today, we know that Scott has Asperger's which was unheard of back in the early 90's when he was born. This syndrome was only studied by one doctor at that time so we were forced to figure things out on our own. The public school system was a complete failure; they had no idea what to do with him because he could not behave the way they expected him to behave in a classroom setting but he was still a genius.
They tried to force us to have him drugged saying he must have A.D.D. but the symptoms just didn't fit. Fortunately our pediatrician was very supportive and refused to rush into a diagnosis just to quell the irritation of my son's teachers but he had little to offer for an explanation why my son was so different. It took years before we were able to get a diagnosis of Asperger's and still, I wonder if that really fits him because he has one thing that most Asperger's people do not; my son has a endless amount of empathy and kindness. So we continue to struggle for answers but through it all we have found little ways to adapt and overcome the daily struggles and cooking has played a major role in our success.
I will not deny the fact that when we started this journey, I couldn't cook to save my life. I, like my brother, called mom to find out how long a roast had to stay in the oven or how to boil rice without ending up with little bullets that threatened to break my teeth. My mother and grandfather were the cooks and every family event had them shuffling everyone out of the kitchen so they could whip up an amazing banquet for all to enjoy so there was no special cooking osmosis for me. I had obviously missed the instinctive cooking gene but for my son it was a language he was fluent in from birth. I became determined to learn how to speak some language (any language really) with my son and cooking was the easiest choice..
It started slowly, first with me sitting down and watching cooking shows with him mostly as an excuse to spend time in the same room but eventually I began to absorb what I was watching. Yes, it started to make sense and trust me, that's flippen amazing because I could burn water. Soon, Scott started talking to me during the show to discuss different techniques I learned ( I think he didn't bother talking at first because he knew I just didn't get it) and listening to him talk on the subject made me realize what an incredible mind my child had.
He absorbed information and facts about cooking like a sponge, his only problem was that he had no hand-eye coordination or practical experience in the kitchen so when I eventually talked him into trying to cook for the first time, it was not the smooth sailing we had hoped. I believe there was smoke and flames as well as screaming and running for our lives but in the end no one was hurt. We did have every door and window wide open to air smoke out of our kitchen and the meal resembled a cremation gone horribly wrong. It's safe to say it was a total flop but the experience, however, wasn't. Scott was laughing and animated and even looked me in the eye a few times. At one point I realized he wasn't leaping away from me to make sure he didn't accidentally touch or bump into me; he had relaxed and was genuinely having fun.
Cooking became the bridge I had been looking for that could reach into my son's isolation and gently draw him back into the real world and soon other members of my family witnessed his transformation and joined in. This one small thing...cooking, we do it everyday and it was what started to help our family make a connection with Scott but at the same time we had loads of fun and got to share lots of laughter. Everyone was learning new cooking techniques and trying new recipes, calling or texting about hilarious failures and sharing amazing successes. A flurry of emails with links to our favorite recipes and techniques started zooming back and forth between my mom, brother and myself to a point that I realized it needed to be organize and preserved like a family photo album. I wanted my son to be able to look back on it and remember all the fun we had in our kitchen together.
My first attempt was to make a family cookbook that I gave to everyone at Christmas but we added recipes at a rate that made it just too cumbersome to always add manually. Recipes were strewn all over the place so I had to find an electronic way of storing all this information which lead to my next attempt. That, unfortunately, didn't work out so well. I signed up on a very popular recipe website that shall remain nameless. They wanted money and they used our sign up as acceptance that they could use our recipes however they wished which meant posting them publicly. Now remember, I did say I wasn't the best cook in the world so we had a system where our recipes were shared and tweaked by other family members until everyone loved them. Strangers didn't know about this system, nor did they understand that these recipes and cooking in general was more to us than just instructions on the proper way to bake a chicken so when this website posted our recipes publicly, strangers would post negative comments and the trash talking caused a setback with my son. Scott is very protective of me and even though I didn't mind the negative comments (I totally accepted that I was not the best cook in the world) reading the insults or trash talking trolls that posted comments just flat out upset my son more than we expected. I realized I had to find another way to collect our family recipes that would be more within our control but still public enough that our entire extended family with all their friends, could easily access and add to them anytime they wanted.
Tadaaaa, this is where Weebly came into the picture. I have some pretty good website creation skills but other members of my family do not. Weebly was the perfect solution to our problem with it's simple tools and easy to understand instructions. Now anyone in my family can make a recipe and slap it up on the website (well ok almost anyone, my brother is still a complete boob when it comes to computers =D) so we can all enjoy them. By the way, it's ok for me to call my brother a boob because I'm his little sister and that's what little sisters are for. Obviously, I'll be expecting some sibling retaliation for it but this is nothing new around here; we are a goofy lot.
For those of you who took the time to read this, I hope I made you smile by sharing our story. I welcome your comments but ask that you keep the negative ones to yourself, Scott is still very protective of his mother lol.
This website is dedicated to my son Scott and we give an open invitation to anyone who wants to join in and contribute as long as everyone understands that this is more than just a group of recipes; it's a labor of love that has built a bridge of trust between my son and the world. Scott is still very much the genius in the family and he continues to amaze us all but when he comes for dinner at my house, I get a hug and I owe that little miracle to cooking.