My mom is truly a great cook. She can cook and she can bake. She can feel the foods. As I've learning to cook some more ethnic foods she was there right alone side of me learning it too. She is way ahead of me of course. It's like as if she has always been cooking Mexican food or Chinese. And when it comes to baking oh my, she is absolutely awesome. Russian baking is very involved, some times it takes hours just to bake, what we called tort, but it is more like a heavy cakes. Most of them are very complicated multi layered, multi frosted (if I can say that). I learned to love cooking from her. I can’t say though that I learned cooking from her that I did on my own, when I had to cook, living on my own. At home I did spend a lot of time in the kitchen, but never for cooking; mostly talking to her while she was cooking. She’d never let me do anything. I’m too slow for her. She is incredibly fast with everything she does. But lately she started to slow down; years are talking tall on her. There is much to learn from her and I really must do it now, before it is too late (G-d forbid). I need to venture into baking, that is my weak side. I can bake couple of things here and there, and can force my self to read the recipe and try to fallow it, but it is hard.
P.S. I have to ad though, my grandma, was truly phenomenal cook. She had a lot of time on her hands, she never worked, even when my grand father was thrown in to jail by Stalin’s tugs, she did not work. So she’d spend her entire day in the kitchen (cooking and cooking and cooking that included baking too). Perfecting one dish after another. She made these blintzes, I can still taste them in my mouse, nobody could make them that great, and I seriously mean nobody. She could seriously cook and my grand father could seriously eat. He was about 6 feet tall and incredibly strong. There is a picture of him, during WWII; he is lifting a horse on his back, no props, no digital photography, real stuff. My mom likes to tell story how grandma made like 100 or so pirogies; we still call them vareniki, for the guests for the next day. Grandpa came home late from work, when everybody were already asleep, pool out the bowl out refrigerator, and ate them called. By the time grandma woke up wand went into the kitchen to see who was making the noise he was almost done with them. Well, she had to start over, but he loved it. He really appreciated everything she cooked. Even though I think he’d eat anything you’d put in front of him. He always made sure to tell her how wonderful everything was and how much he loved it. She in turn would cook more. That was an ideal situation. G-d I miss them.