Cookin' with The Boss Lady

During mine and Mike's engagement, Mike's Aunt Helen and his cousin, Shannon, hosted a beautiful wedding shower for me at this wonderful tea room here. It's one of those charming tea rooms that has antiques everywhere and old black and white photos of brides in ornate frames propped up all over the rooms. The food is incredible too and I remember being so very, very excited to have a shower there. 

I was fortunate to have several showers and celebrations around my wedding but this one sticks out to me because tonight I used a very special gift that I received from Helen and Shannon at that shower. They had asked each guest to bring a favorite recipe and they included those recipes in a book for me to use in my new life as a married woman. Shannon and Helen are incredible cooks and they included some of their faves. Other family members included old family recipes and I cannot express how much I love this cookbook. Mike and I come from a long line of incredible cooks so it is full of deliciousness. When I received it, I was so excited to try out the many recipes and I felt honored to be able to carry out a legacy of good cooking. I imagined making many of the dishes and I looked forward to a day when I would be mixing up the cookie recipe with my own family.

The wonderful cookbook!

When I found out I was pregnant with a little girl just 3 short years ago, I just *knew* she and I would be in the kitchen together baking pies or making the pancake recipe my mother-in-law included in the book that she and my father-in-law used to make with Mike and his brother. 

Then I had my sweet girl and instead of scraping cake batter from a bowl into a freshly greased pan, I was scraping poop off my hands and trying desperately to keep my eyes open despite overwhelming exhaustion. There were days when I wondered where my picture-perfect vision of motherhood had gone and where in the hell it had come from in the first place. Was I delusional? Why did I ever think I'd be rolling out pie crust with a baby? I barely had time or energy to shower, much less make a damn pie crust. 

I still used the cookbook many times over the past couple of years but have usually had to rush through each recipe before The Boss Lady needed me to do something else for her. Lately though, Olivia has expressed a big interest in cooking and she always wants to help make dinner or breakfast or whatever it is we are doing. She wants to pour things in the bowl and stir and she loves standing in a chair at the counter to watch. Olivia's curiosity about cooking helped bring my dream like visions of cooking with my daughter to fruition tonight.  

We had some old bananas and I wanted to turn them into banana bread. I told Oli I was going to make some and she asked if she could help. Though it was bath time I thought we'd give it a shot. We got out the cookbook and opened it to my mother-in-law's banana bread recipe. She pulled up a chair and started helping me mix up the ingredients. She handed me utensils like an experienced sous chef. She mixed and poured and even helped do the dishes after. True story. 

She's helped before but there's usually some whining or distraction involved but tonight she truly, truly helped and enjoyed doing it! As we folded flour into eggs, she and I talked about our names and how we have the same middle name and how neat that is. We talked about how my name is Stephanie AND Mommy and that really blew her mind. And the whole time I felt like I was in Heaven being in the kitchen with my daughter making banana bread and talking. There was no temper tantrum or insanity and I remembered my visions from long ago of enjoying this wonderful cookbook with my own daughter. And it was actually happening! 

There are a lot of nights around here that are chaotic and there are a lot that are fun but this night, this night was THAT picture for me of Motherhood. This was that picture I had in my head way before I had a kid, way before I realized that parenthood is actually a lot of work. This was that crap you see on some cake mix commercial where everyone looks happy and wonderful and you wonder how the mom in the commercial isn't losing her mind with three kids and them throwing cake batter all over the place and how has she managed to say so thin after three kids so you know she can't possibly be eating the damn brownies and anyway you get the point. And aside from the fact that I was wearing sweatpants, we could have been in that friggin' commercial tonight! 

So now I've got to go because my oven timer just went off. Which means I have fresh pan of chocolate chip banana bread waiting for The Boss Lady and me. Maybe I'll get lucky and be like that mom in those commercials and not gain an ounce from eating the fruits of my labor. It's cool if I do though. After all, I am still wearing the sweatpants...

Stirring up the bananas

Yes, she actually wanted to wash the dishes!