I almost always have the ingredients on hand to make them. Baking was
my first solo foray into cooking from a recipe. I started with these
god awful vanilla refridgerator cookies, again because the ingredients
were what we had on hand. I was in 5th grade so I was probably 10. I
had my mom’s vintage 70’s Betty Crocker cookbook and the cookies were
supposed to be vanilla and chocolate pinwheels, but we didn’t have
cocoa powder and rolling the doughs was complicated for a lone 10 year
old. Shortly after I found the peanut butter cookie recipe that I
still use 25 years later, with one tiny alteration. Baking was also
the Kid’s first solo in the kitchen, and with no motherly bias I can
say his from scratch brownies are the best brownies on the planet,
outshining those dry things they sell in fancy bakeries by kilowatts.
Last night he made pork chops with mushroom sauce, mashy potatoes and
asperagus (the pork was a wee bit undercooked, but shhhhh. Everything
else was so perfect I didn’t wanna bust his happy).