When I was registering for my wedding presents, my mother looked at the mixers and utensils and pizza stone and said, in an incredulous tone, “Well, who’s going to do all this cooking?”  I was choosing it all because outfitting the kitchen seemed like a such a wifely thing to do, but in total honesty, I wasn’t sure who was going to do it either. No one who knew me as a child or teenager or even graduate student would ever have picked me out as an aspiring foodie, amateur baker, or hobbyist cook, but these are all labels I would use to describe myself today.

My passion for cooking was born sometime around the same time as my girls; I convinced myself that I needed to make all their baby food as a test of my ability to be an excellent mother, and so I bought Super Baby Food and went to work, with my shiny new wedding-present appliances and a lot of determination. I graduated to quick breads once they started eating more solid food, and then to chocolate chip cookies once they were big enough to put a chubby toddler hand under mine on the mixer as it twirled around my big steel bowl. Somewhere along the way, I slowly but surely figured out how to get dinner on the table every day, and baking became one of my favorite mother-daughter activities.

When I daydream, it’s often about taking a chocolate tour in Paris or cooking vacation in Italy, but more than taking one of those trips or mastering the perfect baguette, I want my girls to grow up feeling comfortable with food, both the preparation of it and their own relationships to it. I titled this post after one of the lines in Ratatouille, my favorite animated movie, because it is such a resonant idea for me. Cooking is so mundane and yet powerful at the same time; it can be part of daily sustenance, but it can transport us, communicate our love so clearly, and evoke a flood of memories with one spoonful. If nothing else, I want my girls to feel that power within their own hands, to know they can seize it with a pot, a fork, a handful of salt, a cup or two of water, and to experience the same awe and wonder I do when I reach into the oven and pull out possibilities.

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