Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

dizastress and yi: omg, me too! in a silent (S-I-L-E-N-T) office area and here I am giggling at the thought of lookalike cats staring each other down from across the street....oh, geez. i've gotta step outside to let this laugh out or i may just implode!

My Korean wedding banquet. OK, she had help, but I know her food and her organizational skills and so I can confidently say, she prepared this meal. And it was amazing and I will always remember it.

Her cooking and baking was so phenomenal, it's impossible to choose. She was always trying new recipes, especially from Julia and Jacques. I loved her pies and gratins.

Stuffed artichokes smothered in tomato sauce.. YUM.

Pot roast

my mom made the most awesome fried chicken :)

We always loved funnel cake from the local fairs and festivals and one year we were all too sick to attend and we were sad to miss the funnel cake. My Mom bravely attempted a funnel cake at home. It didn't look right or taste right but it was full of memories :-)

My mother was a fantastic cook. Raised during the Depression, she honed her cooking skills from her mother, a Swiss immigrant in a small mining town in Virginia. Her Swiss cooking was superior. What she excelled in was Hungarian cooking. She married my father, a first generation Hungarian American. They lived in a close-knit Hungarian neighborhood where the flavors of Hungary were reflected in their garden and kitchen. My grandmother took my mother under her wing and taught her to cook the Hungarian way. My most memorable dinner was her Chicken Paprika served over Hungarian spoon dumplings and accompanied by a simple cucumber and onion salad. The perfect ending for the meal was a slice of Dobes Torte, a rich Hungarian nut torte. This meal was reserved for special occasions. I worked in the kitchen with my mother to make sure that I could recreate these dishes. I am pretty good at preparing this meal. Of course, it pales in comparison to my mother's and grandmother's versions of these dishes.

Salami & butter sandwiches

The most memorable meal that my mother made for me contained anchovies. Need I say more! I am still trying to recover from that meal years later!

Mom's blueberry buckle fresh out of the oven. There is no better weekend treat!

Mom makes the chocolate fudge icing that you can literaly peel off of the cake and eat it like candy!

My mother prepared a lot of memorable meals, as she is a great cook. The comfort foods - brisket, chicken soup, stuffed grape leaves, vats of hummous - definitely stand out. But the most memorable were the ones she DIDN'T cook, when she thought we latchkey kids (the oldest in junior high at the time) could handle some simple cooking on our own and left a half-ound of hamburder or a few pieces of chicken to our devices. Mom had shown us the basics of cooking, how to read a cookbook, and so forth. While we could have done basic stuff, I remember Spanish rice, mini-cheeseburgers on homemade buns from a bisquit recipe, and stir-fried beef with cucumbers and some of our tested recipes. It gave us the skills and confidence to cook once we left home - and the knowledge of important steps like "clean as you go" and dealing with greasy pans.