I just plain love to cook - and bake.  I'm fortunate to come from a long line of good cooks, and I hope that is something that passes along to my own kids - so far, so good!

Last Christmas, I put together an assortment of recipes that my kids love - that I generally just wing at this point - so they could replicate them and carry on the tradition.  I was really pleased that these recipes were probably the present they were most tickled with.

For me, food is community and caring and connection, a way for people to talk to each other, to tell the old stories about the food or the occasions when a particular dish made its debut.

In my family, my mother still tells the story of how, as a newlywed, she wanted to impress her in-laws by baking her father-in-law's favorite dessert: cherry pie.  This was quite brave, as my grandmother was known for the quality of her pie crust!  There was a long tradition in my father's family that if you got a piece of cherry pie with a cherry pit in it, you got a second piece of pie.  Well - you can see this one coming, can't you? - she made the pie, but with my grandfather's first bite, it was clear that my mother had made the pie with canned cherries that had not been pitted...apparently, my grandfather was as gracious as he was wise, and managed to turn the whole thing into something my mother didn't have to feel embarrassed about.

But she still remembers her chagrin on realizing what she had done.