Not my favorite, but my first cooking memory. Standing on a chair next to my mother while carefully rubbing my fingers together making sure I couldn't feel ANY sugar in the meringue and being amazed at the way gross egg whites turned into magic.

Can I write couple?

a) sitting together every Sunday for a family breakfast(only day that we didn't have school, so we could eat all together). It was an eat-in kitchen as every other kitchen out there. We always had pretty much the same Sunday menu-potato puree plus canned fish in tomato sauce..now it's kinda funny why I considered this the best breakfast food ever but yeah..,I was a picky, very non-fancy eater when little..very conservative..missed so many amazing dinners lol..but then-they don't make this canned fish in tomato sauce as they used to, anymore..:)

And I was incredibly happy each time.

(Except for the time when I laughed so hard and got so unruly I spilled my milk and they told me to leave the table because kids starve in other countries)

b) helping my Mom to bake her signature cake before guests would come..the cake was called "Auntie Anna's cake" because it was Auntie Anna's recipe:) Nobody knew the official name of that cake. But it involved several layers, special jam(not really jam but I forgot the right word..you know when you actually have pieces and bits of fruits or berries?), and lots of nuts..

I usually lurk on this forum but this thread made me nostalgic.

Growing up in India, every Sunday, my sister and I would rush through the weekly ritual of washing our hair (complete with a scalp oil massage) and taking a shower on sunday morning (we were not served food until showered), reciting our morning prayers and gobbling down an early lunch by 11 am. My mom served us our sunday lunch special of rajma (Indian chilli) and potatoes, fried papad (Indian rice crackers) and homemade yogurt with rice pulao.

And only then, after we had washed our plates and cleared the table, we were allowed to turn the TV on and get our weekly fix of one episode of Tom and Jerry (the only cartoon show that aired once a week on our local TV), all the while praying that we would not be subject to the regularly-occurring- but- always-unscheduled power outage !

So my best kitchen memories are associated with tom and jerry - I still love that cartoon ...

The first thing that popped into my head was my grandmother at the sink, hulling strawberries. Her kitchen was a magical place to us kids. I remember the pale blue counters, the swinging door into the dining room (I had to have one in our new house, 60 years later), and a corner pantry with all of the utensils hanging on the inside of the door that made the best sound when you slammed it (I'm sure Granny disagreed). There was a real greenhouse directly off of the kitchen, but that's another thread.

My brother and I always got excited when my mom took out the red handled egg beater to make whipped cream or butter.

Coming home from school, opening the front door, and smelling the incomparable aroma of my mom's pot roast for dinner. Now when I make my own pot roast, it's partly done just to rekindle that memory.

My fondest memory of the kitchen, besides learning to cook in it, is sitting at the kitchen table doing homework while Mom was cooking dinner.

When my son (now 47!) was about 18 months old, he would stand on a chair next to the stove and "help" his father make the family recipe for Welsh Rarebit. One time, his best friend was over to spend the night and somewhere I have a picture of these two little boys, standing together on that chair. They're wearing corduroy John Johns - pants that buttoned on the shoulders - and turtlenecks underneath. They looked SO cute! These two are still friends even though they haven't lived in the same town since age 11.

As a kid we got some sort of candle making kit. I decided to try it out one day after school, by myself. I heated up some candle wax on the stove and when trying to pour it into a mold, the mold fell over and all the hot melted wax ran down on all over our new wood stained kitchen cabinets..................

1. Coloring for hours at the kitchen table while my mom cooked or baked.

2. Getting my long hair washed in the kitchen sink and then sitting under the dryer that was set up at the kitchen table. My mom would then put my hair in 2 very tight braids, which is how I wore my hair until I was 13. If I didn't complain I would be rewarded with warm cookies and milk!

3. Playing jacks on the kitchen floor with my best friend. The kitchen linoleum was the only hard flooring in our house besides the bathrooms. The rest was wall-to-wall carpeting. We would sit cross legged in front of the fridge in the winter because the bottom vent blew warm air out.

4. A million memories of cooking, baking and sitting down for meals in this kitchen with my three children. Homework, spelling lists and board games at the kitchen table... it seems like just yesterday.

Wow thank you everyone so far for your memories. They're so wonderful to read through.

Having a nice kitchen to work in is great but at the end of the day, it's all about life being lived and it's nice to glimpse the bits and pieces that you've shared.

Playing in the floor or at the kitchen table and just smelling the food being cooked. I felt so at home and satisfied. Of course, I also loved the eating part! :)

I still remember our kitchen in our new 1958 Levittown house. It had matching yellow appliances and metal cabinets. You could tell when a Levittown house was built by the color of the kitchen. The 1959 kitchens were pink and I think the next year turquoise.

I also remember the delicious smell of my mother making strawberry preserves this time of year (homegrown berries season). That smell is intoxicating! And then seeing the shallow pans on our screened porch, put in the sun - can't remember why my mother did this but there was a reason!. They color was like rubies, just glistening! And no, my mother would have died before she used SureJel or any other commercial pectin! It was a matter of honor with her.

I remember how sound didn't echo after my mom put shag carpet in the kitchen. We didn't realize sound echoed off the chic metal cabinets beforehand!

I remember in college, my sister and I having horrible hangovers. Yup. Hangovers. She was lying on the kitchen floor, hamming it up, moaning. My mother was scolding us, trying not to laugh. My sis combed her hair out wildly the floor, and for some reason, stuck black olives in her nose. I stood over her and took a picture. We were laughing so hard we couldn't even talk. Months later, my very photogenic sister sent me a copy of that picture. Even with black olives in her nose, hung over with mascara circles under her eyes, she was gorgeous.

I remember cooking a lot of brownies.
My mom making Chicken a la orange.
Vegetable soup for the 1st time, using my grandma's canned tomatoes. We'd always wondered what to do with those she gave us, and they were definitely a vegetable soup game changer.
My dad making us breakfast every morning and dunking toast in coffee with cream.
Him always having peanut M&Ms and orange juice in the fridge when I came home from school.
Him trying to make me eat tuna casserole. He'd never try that foolishness again.
My mom paying me to eat broccoli. Not enough money in the entire universe for that.
Making meatloaf when my mom went back to school.

I remember being at the table for a meal. Maybe Sunday, I don't know. Something happened on the TV and we all went into the family room to look. When we returned to the table, there, on the roast, stood our poodle, Tappy. Tappy started eating faster when she saw us. We were probably standing there with jaws dropped. I do remember us laughing so hard we couldn't talk.

We did that a lot.

What I don't remember, is learning how to cook.

Here's another- Although our family of four resided in a 3 room apartment, we still enjoyed the Lionel train set up on a large table built just for that purpose. The train had lots of track. it was a very big set up and took up most of the kitchen.

My best kitchen memory is my Gramma's kitchen. In a 5 room house that she locked with a skeleton key, which she then hung under a jacket in the porch area before she left the house. This was up until 1999 that she had a skeleton key, I'm pretty sure. It was one counter and the top matched the kitchen table, which was oval and had legs like this: )( with two rings holding them together and we would hang out under the table doing acrobatics on those two rings. It was a heavy 50s chrome table with big clunky chairs. My brother has that set now. When I was small it had turquoise vinyl, but now it is avocado patterned vinyl. I have the step-stool chair that the steps unfold out from under it and we used to sit at the end of the counter talking on the rotary dial phone on that chair. I found one many years ago that I HAD to buy because it reminded me of my Gramma, so now I have two of them. They are currently in my laundry room. I remember the stove was so cool because when you turned the dial for the burner it lit up into different colours, so hot was red, and cool was blue, and there were other colours in between. She had a long porcelain (?) sink that we would take a bath in when we were really small. My Mom's childhood table and chairs were in there too and a bell that hung on a small plaque with the words Good food, good meat, good gosh, let's eat! And she had a toothpick holder with a woodpecker that you would push down on the head and it would pick up a toothpick in it's beak. My sister has that now.

Great topic, beachem!!!

I am blessed to be living in the house I grew up in. Mom is no longer here and we recently remodeled the kitchen. It is barely recognizable as the same kitchen, but we often talk about the "old" kitchen. My paternal grandmother came annually for months long visits and cooked many of the old family recipes. It was comforting to come home from school and see her sitting in a chair with a huge round metal dishpan on her lap, adding flour to the dough in the pan to make it very dry, then rubbing it between her fingers to make the tiny dumplings/noodles we called rivel. It was a very time consuming project. And then they were boiled in milk, salt and butter to make a soup. I always looked forward to Grandma's visits.

donna loomis - I think your grandma's "rivel" are our Swiss "Ribel or Ribbeli: (meaning rubbed between fingers) I still make a version with coarse polenta corn meal. I don't put them into soups though, I panfry them and top them with a bit of sugar and cinnamon, or a savory version with herbs and spices, browned in olive oil and topped with roasted cherry tomatoes. Yumm.

I'll post my kitchen memories later, as I'm officially at WORK!

I CEFreeman - Your upbringing sounds hilarious, I love how you remember laughing so hard you couldn't talk, I'm glad to be able to say that I too remember how we laughed a lot. I do hope that I passed this on to our own (now grown) kids.

My favorite memory is of helping to bake christmas cookies. My Mom was known for them and she would bake for a whole week before christmas. I'd run home from school, knowing that the whole house would smell of Zimtsterne, Spitzbuben, Mailänderli, Brunsli, Zitronenmöndli, Mandelziegel, Haselnuss und Kokos Makrönli and many others. What great fun it was to roll out dough, cutting the, stars, moons and hearts with the cookie cutters or going freeform alltogether, and cut out funny bonhommes (figures) and animals. I especially loved making the round Spitzbuben (Mischievous Little Rascals) , which received funny faces cut out with tiny jello cutters. All the while we kids would spill and drop things and generally make a mess, but all our Mom did was lead us in singing silly christmas songs.

I'm glad to say, that my grown kids, both my daughter and my son love baking these cookies, they both stay with us over the Holidays and bake up a storm together. Here is a sample of their efforts from last year:

Gorgeous and look delicious! My mother was a big cookie baker at Christmas, too. She often made 8-12 different kinds of cookies, all just fabulous. My son and daughter do make her famous cut-out cookies today.