My mom was terrific. I feel that I have to start out by saying that since I’m going to be talking about something she didn’t do well. My father died when I was eleven and she raised my brother and me by herself in a time and place when that wasn’t exactly easy. And she did a damn good job of it too.

But here’s the thing—she was a terrible cook. Really. It wasn’t that she spilled or burned things, which is sort of the typical picture of a bad cook. She just never made anything that tasted particularly good. My brother and I have reminisced occasionally over some of her less inspired concoctions—noodles over mashed potatoes, for example, to accompany thoroughly steamed Sunday roast (Mom was definitely not someone who’d go for the South Beach Diet) or casseroles where the onions were chopped so coarsely that they never got entirely cooked, even when they’d been in the oven for a few hours.

Predictably, my mom loved convenience foods. Frozen dinners, for example, which we had every weekend. Mixes of all types. She was even known to make spaghetti sauce from ketchup, although I preferred the one she made from tomato soup. In fact, the number of casseroles she made involving condensed cream of mushroom soup boggles the mind.

She also fell in love with recipes. When she found one that she could make work (and there were a lot she couldn’t), she’d stick with it until we were all pretty sick of it. I remember a kind of gazpacho—canned tomato soup with chopped carrots and peppers—that she served once a week or so for one entire summer. I wasn’t so bad, but it wasn’t something you rushed to the table for, particularly after you’d had it for a month or so.

Given that the only cooking I was familiar with was fairly awful, I guess it’s surprising that I’m a pretty good cook myself. I’m not sure how this happened. I started out using Hamburger Helper and a lot of tuna since the hubs and I were students and had basically no money. But somewhere along the line, I acquired a copy of The James Beard Cookbook, which I read as if it were a novel. Something about Beard’s love of food and his simple instructions for making it taste good struck a chord. When we lived in New England for a while (still with no money) we had a fantastic garden, and I found out what it meant to use ultra-fresh produce. I learned how to bake bread, which I still do on occasion (but not as often as I used to—having fresh bread around the house is an invitation to carbo loading). I learned that not only am I a lousy pastry chef, I don’t even like pastry all that much (one less thing to stress over).

But most of all, what I learned was the joy of preparing food that tasted good. Not all of my dishes worked out, which is still true of course. But many of them did. And there’s nothing like digging in your fork and seeing people smile. Granted, we now live in a time when good cooking is not only honored, it’s almost expected. Chefs are celebrities and weekly newspaper Food sections tell you where to get the best bok choy. Magazines like Cooks Illustrated tell you how to reverse engineer those casseroles my mom made with mushroom soup so that they’re made entirely with fresh ingredients.

It’s all a little precious sometimes. But it’s also sort of wonderful to go to a farmers market and know you can turn that bunch of fresh asparagus into something delectable with just a little olive oil, kosher salt and lemon juice. I wonder now if my mom ever experienced that feeling. I hope she did, at least every once in a while.