Recipe for disaster

Magnet #1218 - Carnation's Easy-Does-It Cookbook

Another one of my Lovely Day Designs magnets I picked up a few weeks ago. Supercute, super-retro.

Picked it for today, because I'm back home in North Carolina, at least for a bit. Which means another couple of weeks of numerous home-cooked breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Yay!

I swear, when I finally move back home to NYC, I will likely drop a good 10-15 pounds without my parents' home cooking to pudge me up.

Don't get me wrong. I definitely know to be grateful for all the meals my parents are cooking for me. It's great. And when I'm ordering my umpteenth meal at from any number of delivery guys who know my address, I'll definitely miss being called down to the table.

But here's something funny. We've started to notice a weird ebb in the flow of my mother's cooking. And I'm blaming those damn cooking channels and their tv shows.

The fact of the matter is - and I say this objectively speaking, I swear - my mother is, hands down, the best cook I know. She is! She always has been. Ask anyone who's had her cooking, they will agree.

Best of all, Mom's one of those old-school chefs that do it by touch, feel, smell and of course, taste. And she doesn't need any of those stupid tv shows with those annoying chefs and their fake kitchens and all their fancy recipes and concoctions to tell her how to make good food.

She does all that on her own.

So herein lies the problem. She's constantly watching all those stupid tv shows with those annoying chefs and their fake kitchens and all their fancy recipes and concoctions.

And she's taking notes!

What's worse, is that she's starting to try and mimic those recipes!

What I'm learning is, all that does is mess with her mojo.

It's no longer Mom's cooking. I mean, it's good, for the most part. But it truly makes me crazy when I hear, oh, I tried so-and-so's recipe. It's like podMom's cooking.

Today, she followed a recipe from someone on tv, and it ended up salty. No. I mean, so salty that even my mother, who thinks salt is a food group, couldn't eat it. We had to throw away the whole NY strip. Steak! We threw away steak!

So my goal for the next few weeks is to break Mom of these silly tv recipes that aren't so great. To go back to trusting her fabulous cook instincts and go from there.

Now. If I could just figure out how to block the signal for Food and Cooking from our DirectTV here at home, that'd be superduperawesome.

And I'm not just saying that because it's on, morning, noon and night when she's home. Nope. Not at all.