Everyone’s got that food.

Mine is chocolate chip cookies. These simple culinary creations were the foundation of my childhood education in the world of food. My mother would often let me sit up on the counter in the kitchen and watch as she added various amounts of ingredients that resided in the cabinets out of my reach. The end product was a dough. I did not understand how the dough had come to be, or how it became the cookies that I had for so long enjoyed, but I understood that it was the product of a definite process that my mother had long before committed to memory. And that it tasted like all that is good in the universe all at once. This only added to the mystery of it.

It was through my mother’s slow, patient teaching that I had learned to become an avid reader when I became interested in stories. My mom then lovingly entertained my fascination with baking and cooking when I started showing an interest, allowing me to slowly and carefully develop my skills and knowledge as a baker. (I wasn’t quite a chef yet seeing as I had a long way to go before making pot roast, being five years old and all.) My sister had long before gone through this process of learning how to make cookies, but she took her experience differently. My sister was definitely a baker of convenience and of the utmost selfishness. Now, I loved cooking for my mom and my dad, and even my sister, always trying to surprise them while simultaneously asking them to hand me every single ingredient I was using. If Maria, my sister, felt like making cookies, she ate half the dough while baking and hoarded the end product all to herself. I found this a complete travesty towards the art of cookie baking. Where was the love?

The love I take from baking cookies doesn’t come from a single batch. It comes from the hundreds of batches over nineteen years that my friends and I have consumed. (My mom finds it necessary to have cookies ready, in as soon as twenty minutes, if she knows my friends are coming over. Needless to say, my friends like coming over.) It comes from the familiarity that I have with the ingredients and being able to finally nail that perfect technique that I could not have possibly ever have figured out without watching my mom for all those years. It comes from the hilarious fact that while I try as many different cookie recipes as I can, my mom has smartly boiled it down to a single, simple recipe that she’s stuck with for decades. It’s as though she knows for a fact that no other cookie can really compare.

Yes, I am the adventurous one in the family. My sister, recently married, found out how to cook rather quickly out of necessity after graduating college. My dad simply does not cook beyond heating a bowl of soup. My mom is the rock that I found all my knowledge upon, always asking her this or that, drawing upon her knowledge that draws upon her grandmother’s. I have really branched out when it comes to cooking, seeing as my mom has been on permanent health food duty for five years and will be for the rest of her life because of my dad’s heart healthy concerns. I like to try a different recipe every time I cook, making for hundreds of allrecipes.com print outs in a drawer. Yes, cooking is a hobby and passion of mine. I love cooking for my friends, sometimes never even tasting a single product of my hard work, because none of them can cook and I love to share my gift with them. (Take that, sis.) Food is one of those things in life that really makes me happy, and I hope that somehow I can use this food blog to share my love and interest with food, with you, the reader, and get you excited about food as well.

Yes, we all have that food. Well, maybe it’s just people like me who love making food who have that food. Maybe that food can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Maybe for you it’s a specific memory or time in your life. Maybe it’s a particular person that that food reminds you of every time you see or smell it. Whatever it is, it all started somewhere at some time. Mine all starts while sitting on a counter over a bowl with my mom showing me each ingredient and letting me stir, guiding my hands around the bowl because I was still too small to really mix the dough. It all started with love.

So now I ask you: what’s your “that food” and what does it mean to you?