Because Thanksgiving is drawing near, I would love to be able to give you a list of all of the things for which I am truly thankful. Unfortunately, my head is too full of the real reason we gather around the table together each November: Food. Ruminating on what I’m going to create for Turkey Day and, more importantly, what I’m going to eat, makes my toes curl in slavering anticipation.

When contemplating all of the possible delectable edibles, I tend to reach back to my childhood for inspiration. My family never had a lot of money. Not that we were living out of flimsy cardboard boxes on the street, but expenses like vacations and new clothes were not common purchases in my household. (Although I do remember touring Gettysburg, Pa., at one point. My dad made us stop and read every single historical marker. I wasn’t too broken up about skipping the whole vacation experience after that.) However, food was one of the many areas in which my mother knew how to stretch a dollar. She grew her own vegetables and made almost everything from scratch. There was no way she was going to pay hard-earned cash for something she could grow in her own backyard or produce with her own two hands. I didn’t even have those pricey little jars of pureed baby food—that’s what a blender was for! It wasn’t unusual for Mom to make a giant pot of soup or chili and serve it every night for a week. Leftovers were never, ever, thrown away—they were either eaten or turned into a “new” dish.

But on special occasions, my mother’s cooking turned from simple sustenance to fabulous foodstuffs. Recently, a friend strongly “suggested” that I make banana bread. While I love the subtle sweetness of this dessert-like nosh, I don’t seem to bake it very often. As the fragrant aroma of the banana/sugar/vanilla trifecta wafted out of my oven, I was transported back to my mother’s kitchen, waiting for the buzzer on our 1950s pink hand-me-down monstrosity to alarm so I could be first in line to receive a hot-out-of-the-oven slice of mellow, melt-in-your-mouth scrumptiousness. In that instant, I realized banana bread rarely makes my baking repertoire because that particular provision is, quite simply, my mother’s. I tend to want tweak recipes as I develop my concoctions, but it’s rather hard to improve on Mom’s perfection.

I have come to the conclusion that 90 percent of my positive childhood memories somehow revolve around food. I remember spending hours sitting on an old-fashioned hand-crank ice-cream maker so the lid wouldn’t come off while the adults pumped the handle, hoping-hoping-hoping I’d be the first to get a taste whenever the mixture inside was deemed frozen. I remember picking red-ripe strawberries on hot summer afternoons, putting only the very smallest in my bucket because I knew they were the sweetest. I remember being just the tiniest bit happy when I was sick enough to stay home from school because my mother would make cinnamon toast for breakfast and chicken and biscuits for lunch, just to coax me to eat. My birthday was my favorite holiday, not because of the gifts, but for the sheer fact that I got to choose the menu for the entire day! If I wanted pancakes for breakfast, homemade mac and cheese for lunch, and pizza for dinner, all I had to do was say so, and no one (aka my big brother) was allowed to influence my decision. Now that was a big deal.

To this day, much of my life is spent thinking about food. I plan a dinner menu for the week, saving my baking for the weekends. I like to get up early on Saturdays to shop at a local open-air market, even if that means I’ll have to make a separate trip to the grocery store later. I look forward to social occasions because they give me an excuse to get out all of my pots and pans and make a giant mess.

With such a focus on gastric pleasure, I sometimes wonder if my future adopted child will love the kitchen as much as I do. Will he/she pick up a spatula or shun the stove? Will I be creating my child’s memories with the help of a food processor? Will my grown-up child stand in his/her own kitchen some day, smiling over recollections of food experiences gone past?

I hope so.

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