When I was a small child, I was always wanting to help my mom mix things. When I was about 5 years old, I was standing on a chair stirring something on our wood stove for her. Lightening came down the stove pipe and knocked the spoon out of my hand. That was my first experience with cooking.

Some of my fondest memories of my Grandma Allison are the times I spent helping her cook. She would wake me up at 4:00 in the morning to grind coffee for breakfast. Grandma Allison would mix and roll out the Biscuit dough and I would cut it and we would bake them in the oven of her wood-burning stove.

It was natural for girls to learn to cook in the "old days," as we had to fix all our food, especially on the farms where I grew up. In those days, all we had to cook on was a wood-burning stove.  My first experience cooking on a gas-burning stove was in Home Economics class at Wagoner High School in Oklahoma. I remember thinking how convenient it was to just turn a knob and have instant fire to cook on.

I lived with Irene and Waldo Jones, friends of our family, at one time.  Irene was an excellent cook. One of the many cooking skills I learned from Irene was how to make good pie crust. The Applesauce Cake recipe came from Irene. It is not only my oldest recipe, but the first written recipe that I remember having. I don't recall Mom ever having a recipe written on paper when I was growing up.

After I got married, I experimented with many different recipes getting some from a cookbook I received as a wedding gift, clipping them from newspapers or magazines. Milt especially liked my Chocolate Chip Cookies and my Apple Pie.  My children always had home baked cookies in their lunches and thought store-bought cookies were a treat, and, so sometimes they would trade one of my home baked cookies for a store-bought one.

I especially liked cooking on holidays making special treats for my family.  Treats that became a tradition were iced Cutout Cookies, Press Cookies, and Divinity for Christmas; Popcorn Balls for Halloween, a decorated heart-shaped Red Devil's Food Cake with "To My Valentine" written on it for Valentine's Day, and white cake decorated with 7-Minute frosting sprinkled with dyed green coconut and jelly beans for Easter.