I spent the first half of my project researching Mexican cuisine, as well as the history of traditional recipes and how various ingredients became incorporated into the food of the Southwest region. The second half of my project was focused on creating a video to document my family's recipe for making tamales. I analyzed the recipe and its larger cultural and social implications which I presented with a PowerPoint.

I spent the first half of my project researching Mexican cuisine, as well as the history of traditional recipes and how various ingredients became incorporated into the food of the Southwest region. The second half of my project was focused on creating a video to document my family's recipe for making tamales. I analyzed the recipe and its larger cultural and social implications which I presented with a PowerPoint.

The goal of this project is to document and format a cookbook of my grandmother’s Palestinian recipes while learning about her life and the history of Palestine. This process included research of Palestinian history from many different sources: books, Palestinian cookbooks, and online articles to form a foundation for the food and culture behind the recipes from Palestine. It also included intensive cooking lessons with different women in our family to measure, practice, and taste different dishes included in this project. The focus of this cookbook was our grandmother’s recipes, but soon after starting, we realized that cooking in a Palestinian household is a group effort and rarely done by one person. Due to this realization, we decided that everyone in the family would be recognized in constructing this cookbook. After completing this project, we documented stories and experiences of my grandmother’s move to America at a young age, raising five children with no family around her, and her ability to find substitutes for ingredients that were not available in America that we did not know of before. Our relationship with our family and culture has strengthened during this experience, and we are now more confident in who we are and what we can offer to our future generations.