My Life With a Mini-Martha

Over the last few months, my daughter has really taken an interest in cooking and baking. She will stand in the kitchen when my husband is cooking asking him all sorts of questions about different spices and cooking techniques. During the weekly visit to the library, she will check out at least two cookbooks along with her other finds. She was thrilled at Christmas to receive two new cookbooks by Sam Stern – a Brit teen who reminds me of Jaime Oliver. One of her assignments is to write a book review for her favorite of these new books – I will be sure to post it when it is complete.


I am not a good cook – let’s just get that out of the way right now. I love, love, love to bake all sorts of breads, cookies, muffins, you name it. But I am just not that great at cooking dinner fare. Oh sure, I have a rotation of about 8 or 9 meals I can prepare that don’t elicit pained expressions on my kids when I serve them. I am still amazed when I prepare a meal and one of my children says something like “will you make this again, it’s really good”. On the rare occasions that happens, of course. Let’s just say that I am blessed to have a husband that loves to cook and is really quite good at it and leave it at that.

Baking has always been my turf in the house. My husband won’t even attempt it. He doesn’t even like to be left in charge to determine if a loaf of bread or a batch of cookies are ready to be taken out of the oven.

Last night I spent a few hours trying to catch up on paperwork and filing while my husband was at his game. At some point during this time, my daughter announced that she wanted to bake something – like brownies – but she couldn’t because we didn’t have any chocolate chips. All we had in the house were peanut butter chips and peppermint chips. I didn’t think much of it, but told her to just substitute the peanut butter chips for chocolate and give that a try. I remember at one point wondering to myself why in the world she needed baking chips to make brownies, but that thought was chased away by the papers that needed filing.

And then, at some point before the oven timer went off, I realized that my daughter was making brownies FROM SCRATCH. I have never, ever, made brownies that didn’t come from a box. Not a single time. Me, the one who loves experimenting with muffin recipes and making home made pizza crust for my kids.

When my husband returned home last night, I told him about the brownies and the fact that my not-quite-thirteen-year-old daughter had done something that I had never done. He stood there in the kitchen with a blank stare on his face. It turns out that even my hubby - you remember, the one who claims to not be able to tell when a batch of cookies is ready to come out of the oven, yeah, that one - even HE has done this.

Oh yeah, the peanut butteries (that’s the name we settled on) were delicious