Cooking with My Mom

I have been cooking with my mom, well, for pretty much EVER.  She taught me, from the time I had to stand on a kitchen chair at the counter, up to my first cake entry at a little county fair (which won Best in Fair and got me a HUGE purple rosette), and we still cook together when she visits.  She is an amazing cook who has "been there and done that" in terms of the restaurant/food business.  She has run a lunch and sweet shop that became locally famous for her bagels and hand-dipped truffles; a restaurant that became famous for her scratch pizza and sourdough pancakes (seriously, ONE is enough, sir; they're 10" in diameter), and supplied homemade desserts for a New Jersey restaurant in the early 70's. 

At the Jersey shore with my mom; one of my favorite pics ever.

On one of her last visits, Mom reminded me about how she used to keep me occupied by turning on 'Sesame Street', back when it was a "new" show on TV, while she baked pies at home for the restaurant in New Jersey, so I guess I've been with her in the kitchen for a longer time than I remember.

When she's here, we still spend a lot of our time in the kitchen. In fact, usually we run out of days to make *all* the things we wanted to bake, and the conversations sound like this:

Her:  So, what should we do for dinner tonight?

Me:  Let's do homemade potato pierogi.  We haven't made those yet!  With Polish sausage and saurkraut.

Her:  What about borscht?

Me: That too. And flat bread. And babka! We forgot the chocolate babka!

Her:  There wasn't time. We were too busy making the butter cookies and gingerbread. Enough with the carbs, already.

Me:  We also totally haven't made homemade marshmallows yet.

Her:  I leave tomorrow, remember?

And so on...

This summer she's coming for a longer stay than her last holiday visit, and since I've started putting everything we love into ONEcookbook for our family, I can already tell we're going to be having variations of this conversation a lot.