"Mom, that is SO good!"

I did not learn how to cook growing up. I learned how to open cans and pop out biscuits or pour out soup, but never really learned to cook. My mother was more of a baker, and I remember watching her spend hours baking and beautifying cakes. But cooking was something I had to teach myself.

Mark and I spent the first 4 years of our marriage as missionaries in Croatia. In those days markets were small, there were no mega-marts full of processed and packaged foods. I had to learn to cook from scratch just to survive...and so I did, though I must confess that I did so with a lot of help from Mark, who is a fantastic cook.

The first decade or so I was quite recipe dependent--I pretty much stuck to a recipe's instructions. Several years ago, having gained both confidence and knowledge of the way ingredients work together, I began to experiment with recipes. Adding a little something here, taking out something there. I have a repertoire of dishes that are my "specialties," perfected by trial and error, like spaghetti sauce and the infamous tomato soup I wrote of a few days ago. I still have things that just don't turn out, but I am happy to say that on most nights I hear something like, "Oh, mom, this is SO good!"

The culinary art I have yet to conquer is baking...but that is another day's post!