I love to cook, and my family loves to eat! Growing up, my girls enjoyed many favorite meals at “Mommy’s Restaurant”. Now young adults and foodies themselves, the girls often ask for remake of their old favorites or for my recipes to make their own.

Pulling out old recipes, or even remembering which are the “old favorites” turns out not so easy. My home-cooking, which draws from flavors and recipes from many cuisines, frequently features what is on sale at my local grocery stores. I like to peruse supermarket flyers every weekend, pluck out the best deals, and plan my meals around them. My girls know that Mommy loves a good deal and hates to pay retail. For me, the abundance of in-season produce and meats offers the best deal in price and quality. 

My “secret” for making a good dish is to know what I want it to taste like before making it. That complicates my recipes a bit. With every dish, I often start with several recipes to combine specific ingredients and cooking methods which meet my taste expectations. Reliable online recipe sources include “Cooks Illustrated”, “Epicurious.com” (previously Gourmet Magazine), and sometimes “Serious Eats”. I am able to make many fabulous dishes this way, but my recipes are never quite the same as the originals. This makes remaking old favorites harder because I often forget where the originals come from or write down my adaptations. 

At my girls’ urging to preserve our “family legacy” of their favorite home cooking, I am starting this blog to catalog my best dishes and share my “tips and tricks” about cooking. I hope this will eventually become a depository of our family’s favorite recipes. 

In this blog, I refer my girls as CC#1 and CC#2. A columnist from the Financial Times used to call her daughters Cost Center No. 1 and Cost Center No. 2. I was quite amused and thought it seems fitting here.