Day One - It smells like Pinterest

My mom, Dorothy Johns, in her spot at the dining room table.

My kitchen smelled heavenly this afternoon as I sat my laptop on the kitchen bar and opened up my Yummy Board on Pinterest. It's Sunday and now that I am no longer spending my Sundays editing a radio show, I have time to just enjoy the day.

My daughter went into work early and was tired when she came home but she changed into comfy clothes and helped me in the kitchen. My mom was a fantastic cook and she and my dad even had a restaurant at one time. However, when I married, I didn't even know how to boil an egg or properly cook bacon. After I nearly gave my dad food poisoning with an under-cooked bacon sandwich, my mom apologized to me. Although she cooked every meal when I grew up, I was never allowed in the kitchen - no one was. That was her territory and we were in her way. So...I never learned to cook. I taught myself. And, after 22 years in control of my own kitchen, I think I am pretty damned good at it. My mom loved to cook, not bake. And there is a difference. I began with baking (because I could follow a recipe with precise measurements) and got comfortable enough that I rarely formally measure and can improvise to make recipes my own. Since then, I have taken on the challenge of cooking which is more about luck and pure talent than following instructions. I have always let my daughter help me bake and cook when she wanted to, but I never made her. She has always been welcome in my kitchen. And, before my mother passed away, she allowed my daughter in her kitchen as well (she learned from keeping me out of the kitchen). My mom had go-to recipes and I could even almost predict what we would have each night of the week. When she passed away, I got her cookbooks and her hand-written recipes. When she knew she had a short time to live, she made sure we spent time in the kitchen together, with her teaching me how to make her fabulous fresh corn and chicken and dumplings, along with her pineapple upside down cake and blackberry jam cake. She rarely measured and couldn't tell me how to do it. She had to show me and I wrote down what we did. I am forever grateful for that gift. I think my mom saw cooking as her job and her obligation to her family but she enjoyed it. I am of a different generation that has much more access to ready-made meals and fast food and sit-down restaurants. If I don't want to cook, I don't have to. My mom would always give me a hard time for cooking "fancy" meals from Pampered Chef or AllRecipes.com. They weren't that complicated or fancy, I assured her. I grew up with fried everything and I chose a different path. I never fry anything. I don't even know how. If I eat fried food, someone else has cooked it. I bake, boil, steam and grill. My family has NO idea what they are going to eat each night. They don't even know for certain that I am going to cook a meal. My kitchen is a place of fun and experimentation and I appreciate having a family that is, more often than not, ready and willing to try my new recipes.

Breakfast Quesadilla

So, it seemed appropriate to begin my 365 Days of Pinterest journey in my kitchen, with my daughter. She is an adult now and lives at home while she attends college. I know my time with her in my home is coming to an end sooner rather than later. I hope I can impart a love for cooking on her - or, at least, a desire to take chances.

I began part of tonight's meal yesterday, whipping up a blackberry marinade for Blackberry Pork Chops (the recipe is for pork tenderloin but I had chops) that I pinned to my Yummy Board on Pinterest for others to enjoy. I love blackberries and we eat a lot of chicken in this house, so I thought I should try something with pork. And to accompany it - I made a batch of Freezer Mashed Potatoes (because we love potatoes in this house and making mashed potatoes from scratch is a lot more work than I want to do every time I cook), which I put up to go with tomorrow night's dinner. But I used two cups of those mashed potatoes to make Mashed Potato Waffles. And, since we were in the kitchen, she and I whipped up some breakfast quesadillas so she, my husband, and son could have something fresh and yummy to start their day without me having to get out of bed at the crack of dawn.

Blackberry Pork Chops & Mashed Potato Waffles

Consensus was that dinner was fabulous. There are leftovers for lunch tomorrow, the dogs split an extra waffle and my daughter can feel a small sense of accomplishment at making a dinner from scratch.

Every day will not be about food or cooking ("Ain't nobody got time for that."), so follow my blog and visit every day to see what I have decided to add to my 365 Days of Pinterest.

What have YOU pinned today?