My Mama's Recipe Book | My Mama's Healing Soups: A Journey Through My Mama's Recipe Book

Gabriela Rocha Caballero
May 10
2 min read

This chapter is a reflection of my mother’s kitchen and daily life – where love and presence were the main ingredients – shaping the stories in this magazine. It is also included in My Mama’s Healing Soups, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

"You are smart, creative, beautiful, abundant, and very fortunate. Recognize what makes you truly happy, and keep it." - Maria Teresa Caballero Mier, my mama.

For many years, my mother collected recipes inside an old handmade book. While sitting at her small office desk, she spent hours choosing recipes from magazines and newspapers. She would cut out recipes, and glued them to her book while sighing softly, worried about time.

Among other intellectual goals and achievements, my mama’s daily routine was filled with office work, endless chores and art projects around the house as well as studying spirituality and often lovingly guiding her many friends of all ages.

All while reading endlessly, cooking for an army, sewing her own designs, relentlessly knitting gorgeous sweaters until she almost lost her eyesight and, of course, typing.

Using her old yellow typewriter, she would write historical novels, short stories, and her own food and beauty recipes, as well as different tips for the simple and luxurious lifestyle she knew so well and longed for at the same time.

Her intention was that this cookbook, and the other series of books she was working on, would be my legacy, my inheritance - just in case I wasn’t learning fast enough, aware that anything could happen, just in case we couldn’t be together long enough.

I left home when I was eighteen years old, but I went back many times to continue my photography studies and, of course, to visit my parents. No matter where I was located, either with her or away from her, I traveled a lot around Mexico, and so she used to call me her “little travel agent.”

It was during this time that all of a sudden my powerful mama was diagnosed with terminal cancer, sadly she had smoked since she was 12 years old.

It was only because of her courage and a positive lifestyle that she lived for seven more years. She worked on her book as much as she could, but mostly with other people’s recipes – those of her friends or recipes clipped from newspapers and magazines because she couldn’t type that much anymore.

Unfortunately, none of her delicious soup recipes were recorded on her recipe book. Perhaps because of the simplicity of the recipes, or perhaps because these recipes were so close to her heart and prepared them daily that she completely forgot.

Fortunately, with her training I learned quickly, and from a very young age I began using her delicious recipes, that later became remedies, to heal, nurture and support her healing process.

She left too young, and her work was unfinished. My Mama's Healing Soups is my way of finishing her work, and my wish is to share it with you, because the gift of sharing was her ultimate virtue.

My Mama’s Healing Soups, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.