Concerning baking, I consider myself extremely fortunate. My organist mother had a highly irregular schedule: a typical week might include playing two or three Sunday morning services (more during Holy Week and Christmas), teaching piano and organ, helping brides pick out wedding music (usually requiring her to transcribe music to accommodate soloists unable to sing in the key for which the music was written), choir rehearsals (often more than one), weddings, and accompanying recitalists and community choruses (along with the necessary rehearsals). I’m sure I’m forgetting something … oh, yes, attending seminars and conferences which helped her grow professionally, and indulging in the odd lesson for herself. (And to think people believe church organists are only using the gifts God gave them and shouldn’t have to be paid.)

Anyway, she was also a scratch cook and taught us four kids how to cook. We’d often spend a good chunk of time on Saturday precooking casseroles and things for the week so we could get the meal started after school while she was teaching piano, and when she came home early on Sunday afternoon we had lunch ready to serve.

She was also a child of the Depression, which meant that, in addition to clipping coupons like a fiend, she put up a lot of food and taught us all how to make grape jam and can peaches.

As a result, I’ve been making things like egg & cheese souffles for almost fifty years, and I put up jams, relishes, sauces, tomatoes, and soup stocks faithfully. They make great Christmas gifts (even the stock) and sell terrifically at our church fair (well, maybe not the stock).

Memories of baking and canning with my mother are some of the most precious things I have, and since she moved on to that great organ gig in the sky, it’s all I have left of her.

I was never blessed with children myself, but my husband was and now we have two grandsons who love to help Grandma in the kitchen. I work 40 hours a week, but we cook nearly everything from scratch, and when the grandchildren visit they make a beeline for the child-sized aprons we keep on a hook. My nine year old grandson can make biscuits (with minimal assistance) that put the Pillsbury Doughboy to shame.

I say all this simply to encourage everyone here to bake with their kids and/or grandchildren. Start out small: just learn how to make one thing (like biscuits or pancakes) from scratch, and keep doing it until you don’t need to look at the recipe and it has become part of you. Then pick another simple recipe (like sugar cookie dough) and do the same thing.

One easy scratch cookie technique involves making icebox cookies. Just make the dough, roll it into 6″ logs about 2″ in diameter, wrap the logs in plastic wrap, place all the logs in a freezer bag or container, write something like “oatmeal cookies 8-10 min @ 350” on the label, and toss it in the freezer. When you want freshly baked cookies, you can take out a log, cut it into slices, and voila: a quick dozen or so cookies. Believe me, when kids learn that trick they feel immensely proud, and I say that both as a former child and a grandmother.

Children learn what they live. If you want your kid to read, then they need to see you read or else they won’t think it’s important. Same thing with baking.

Start small. You can do it!

@Denise: Would love to hear more about how things have changed since your mom’s day. It is true that parents used to play less with kids. Of course, now we’re a bit funny about it. I read an article in American Baby in the doctor’s office the other day where a mom was asking how she should play with her baby the “right” way. Ummm…. stop overthinking it! As for Real Simple, I enjoy looking at it, and I think the concept is so appealing to a certain demographic that it has done extraordinarily well. But it really shows the disjointedness about time and money that I’ve tried to write about. Upper middle class women love to think of themselves as busy busy busy and so starved for time and nostalgic about a simple (a real simple!) era. The magazine never challenges these notions. Then again, that’s probably why it’s successful.

@Cara–I agree, there are few people who can afford, or would find the value in a 4-figure purse, even if we aren’t entrepreneurs.
The over-romanticized version of the home is definitely a problem too. My mom was a 2 job single mom and she did it all–meals from scratch, homemade cookies, washing kitchen walls once a week, she even sewed my Communion, Sweet 16 & prom dresses herself! I am a slacker compared to her, yet she often tells me that she spent no time with us b/c this is what Moms of her era did. I am glad to be changing that in my family, but for a long time it was hard to let go of the pressure of what I felt I had to do, especially as a stay-at-home mom. My mom will be the first one to tell you now, that she’s glad things have changed and she wished she had the courage to do things differently when we were young.

@Cara- that’s a good idea, if you’re really into cookie baking, start a cookie business! Focusing on our core competencies…

To encourage entrepreneurship, and the growth of female businesses as well as earning power and intellectual engagement of women in our society — (remember many women are still way stepped out of the workforce once they become moms or cut back) — it is important to change the conversation about the “ideal worker” status etc. That is what does it mean to be an ideal worker — flexible shifts, focus on projects not time,

I enjoyed the Christmas cookie story. Sounds great!

I am not quite clear on the nostalgia for all home made and for our current generation of mom’s obsession with organic and with a certain “Magazine Cover” perfection of the home. We have to be careful as many of these images do romanticize housework and aspects of the traditional woman role that cost women in other areas — and are oppressive. You can’t do all things at all times, and there isn’t shown to be happiness in some of this — and you do get into areas of overparenting and say underworking in the professional sense, if you are not careful!

It must come from women whose mother’s stayed home and did this — but we really should be beyond this if we want women working for money and we want women and mothers empowered. It’s not that people shouldn’t do these things but let’s be realistic about the opportunity costs and goals — as you say here..t he point of a mom of a young child baking cookies with them is only in part about the cookies, right? So please magazines, why the long articles about different kinds of cookies? One day when your kids are older as a grandma, you can make a different kind of cookie for them not with them. But not now. And if you are really that good or into cookies maybe you should start a cookie business.