I am a good home cook. There is a vast difference between home cooks and professional cooks. They have a sophistication with spices and ingredients that I don’t have. Chefs would laugh at my chopping and plating skills, and my dining room could be out on the porch or in the living room, but I wouldn’t be embarrassed to serve them a meal.

I don’t recall showing much interest in cooking when I was young. However, I was an enthusiastic eater (and still am). The anticipation of coming home to the smell of …is that spaghetti I smell? No, it’s biscuits and chicken! The worst days were made better and good day settled into the delicious satisfaction of lying in bed, the taste of a chocolate brownie lingering in the back of my mouth. My mom was an excellent cook, partly because she was a scientist. She used the same precision with food that she used in the lab, but was a fairly non-adventurous cook.

Every Saturday, without fail, she listened to the New York Metropolitan Opera while baking; I remember Tony Randall was the host for many years. When I was around eleven or twelve, I began to help Mom bake on Saturday afternoons. I had discovered that whoever helped got to lick the batters, and often got one or two cookies fresh out of the oven, too.

She had so many recipes: snickerdoodles, oatmeal chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal raisin, frosted pumpkin spice cookies, applesauce cake, date-nut bars, lemon bars, brownies, blondies, and that was just some of the cookies. Her pies were flaky and juicy. She would make custard, rhubarb, apple, lemon meringue, and more. Iced cakes were reserved for special occasions like birthdays. Every Christmas she made snitchgribbles, a sweet yeast dough wrapped around stewed apricots, deep fried, and rolled in sugar. Needless to say, I wanted to learn how to do that.

I baked four or five times a month through high school, but I didn’t start cooking meals until I was a sophomore in college. I could make breakfast foods and simple dinners, but in those years I was far more interested in going out, having fun, and staying fit. I had the good luck to have several boyfriends who loved to cook. I learned how to make excellent spaghetti, potato salad, and a not gross meatloaf from them. Kathy Fernandes was the first friend who influenced my cooking. She was already a grown-ass woman with a husband and a home while I was still flitting around. She taught me how to throw together some great meals with whatever she had on hand.

When I got married, I probably had a repertoire of five or six reliable dinners. Over the years, I called home for more of Mom’s recipes (it is deeply satisfying when an adult child calls to ask how to make one of your recipes) and started finding my own.

Mom was a major force behind my evolution as a cook. At Christmas and birthdays, she gave me high-end cookware, like Calphalon, or a set of mixing bowls from Williams-Sonoma. For many years she gifted me a subscription to Fine Cooking. I found that I like to sit down and go through cookbooks or magazines at the start of each season. I have my mother, grandmother, and even great-grandmother’s cookbooks. Now, I’m more likely to be scanning recipes on Pinterest, or Food Network. It’s a lot easier to see a recipe on an iPad when I’m in the kitchen.

After college, I met Susan and Mike Cuda, friends who are excellent cooks and who taught me how to make brisket. I still make a recipe I got from Susan over forty years ago, a simple potato dish with chicken broth, butter, potatoes, salt, and pepper. “Don’t skimp on the butter, salt, and pepper” was the takeaway. My friend Elaine was a wizard at hiding vegetables in everything, I borrowed many of her tricks.

Pepsi transferred us to North Carolina in ’93 when Katie was five. I was a solid home cook and baker. We met another Pepsi couple with young kids who were also transferred to Winston-Salem. We had young kids and not a lot of money for going out; our major entertainment was going to each other’s houses and eating and drinking.

Vilja and Alex were solid cooks, too. Vilja’s mom, Iru, is one of the finest cooks I’ve known, a cook with a sophisticated palate who could taste a dish and tell you every ingredient. Iru and Alex opened The Carving Board, now a Winston-Salem institution, using her recipes and Alex’s business acumen. Those years of cooking and baking were a time when I gathered recipes and learned to cook for large groups. When we moved to Colorado ten years later, cooking was second nature.

My meal planning is haphazard at best. I see what’s on sale and what looks good and usually decide on three or four meals while I’m shopping. The other meals are the “weekly specials” that are on the menu two or three times a month. I am thrilled when any of my dishes earn a compliment or someone asks for the recipe. I happily give it, but I rarely actually follow a recipe as written, so mine might taste a little different. Often I just make stuff up, like scrambled eggs with avocado and kimchi.

Home cooks are usually adept at cooking for picky eaters. The two hardest to please in my house were Katie and my ex, who said, “I don’t like it.” I learned to work around the dishes and foods they didn’t like.

This was a useful skill when I radically changed my diet in 2002. A body can only take so much abuse; surgeries, endometriosis, traumas, aging, the list is long. I learned a whole new way of cooking without gluten or dairy. It wasn’t that hard, and the payoff was feeling much better. I had to be extra careful after I got Lyme. My body reacted to foods capriciously and violently. I got headaches, body aches, indigestion, itching/rashes, stuffy nose, and coughing. I tell people who can’t believe I really can’t eat some foods that if they felt as bad as I did after eating, say, pizza, they’d have no trouble not eating it.

Now I have a new challenge: Dad’s taste buds have aged, like everything else in his body. Nature did a really shitty job of deciding which body parts to age badly. Not tasting food anymore is a vicious move by nature. It’s made me, once again, reevaluate what foods to cook, and how to serve them. I’ve read that to stimulate an aging palate, use different textures and colors, and don’t be shy with certain spices.

Tonight’s dinner fit the bill. Mango salsa is sweet, spicy, crunchy, and silky. The rice has lime zest, lime juice, and coconut milk, and the salmon is seasoned with lime and garlic. Dad always thanks me for dinner and almost always eats it all. He would live on frozen chicken pot pies if I wasn’t here, so I’m not sure I trust his opinion. I do want him to enjoy eating, though. So I continue to try and create interesting dishes; I’ve been trying Thai and Indian dishes lately.

I had no idea where my love of cooking came from until I found out who my birth parents were. My birth mother’s father owned a restaurant/bakery in McAllen, Texas for many years. Maybe I inherited the cooking gene from him. It’s not a chore to me like it is for many people. Cooking is one of the great pleasures in my life.

Home cooks enjoy a special place in the cooking world. Perhaps I can’t “elevate” a meal or dice uniform pieces like a machine. My table might be “hey grab a plate and sit anywhere.” The dishes might not match, and you’ll probably be put to work. After I’ve cooked and told you where everything is, you’re on your own. You have to decide how much of a dish you can have without looking like a pig. At the end of the evening you’ll go home with a full belly and hopefully, the warm afterglow that good company and a good home cooked meal brings.