If you have been keeping up with my working my way through the alphabet, you know I just wrote my R blog last week (R is for Risotto). Today, however, was my mother’s birthday. She left this world in 2001 and is the one who in numerous ways fed my love of cooking and baking. So today, I just want to celebrate my mother and the gifts she gave me in our kitchen growing up on Kingsland St in Nutley, NJ

My mother inherited a legacy for baking from her mother. While cooking was not her forte, baking was. The two things I remember her baking the most were her rugelach, which I made a few weeks ago.