My mom was an insanely amazing cook and baker.  Any one that knew her loved her cooking.  She had this amazing ability to just come home after church and whip up the best dinner in under an hour and have a dessert baking in the oven before she even took her 4 inch shoes off.  All in her delicately perfumed dress. No apron needed.  She could taste something and then come home and make it hers and lock it into her mental cookbook.

For years I had been begging her to write her recipes down because one day I had a dream to write a cookbook with her. 

The summer before she died she was visiting me in Florida and I asked her to make these fried stuffed dough - piroshky.  I told her I am going to take pictures of her as she cooked,  step by step so we can start documenting the recipes and one day put them together.  She loved the idea, and I loved me some piroshky! I hovered over her as she prepped the meat stuffing and rolled out her dough.  I watched how frustrated she got when it came to actually measuring everything out because she would just "eye" it.  I took pictures of her hands folding the piroshky over, I cant look at those pictures quit yet without completely loosing it. Goodness... I smile and choke back tears as I write because so many conversations happened while watching her cook.  So many tears and so many laughs. FOOD was her love language! Cooking was the way she showed us affection.  She was so beautiful in the kitchen.  It was her Zen place.  It seems like she would just shut out her troubles and for a moment just escape into a dream land as she danced her way about the kitchen. 

I do that now - The kitchen is off limits when I make dinner.  It's me time. 

When we moved to the US from the Ukraine my mom brought one book besides the Bible. It was a book that fascinated me, the few pictures it had made me day dream of one day making everything on those pages. It is a Ukrainian cookbook from the 60's .  I was amazed at how beautifully food can be prepared and plated.  

When I moved to Oregon I found, along with that cookbook, few hand written cook books.  She did start writing her recipes down.  All was not lost. 

HOWEVER, her hand writing is so hard to read because it's written in Russian and no direction on how to make the stuff, just the ingredients and some measuring directions.  So that's where I'm starting. One recipe at a time.  Because - my goodness - my mom cooked good, and I just want that piece of her forever alive in my kitchen. Gosh, you guys, I miss her!