Tuesday Night Date with Mom

Last night my mother and I attended the Taste of Home Cooking School held at a local high school. Some of you may know that Taste of Home is a magazine devoted to recipes sent in by it's readers. There's no advertisements (which is really nice) and there are great hints and shortcuts sprinkled throughout it's pages. My mom had a charter subscription while I get her hand me downs. They take their magazine on the road every so often and do cooking presentations throughout North America.

We went to one of the schools a few years ago and it was a lot better than I thought it'd be- the cafeteria was filled with booths of women's businesses and businesses for women while the cooking school was going on in the auditorium. I was trying to describe it to my husband and the best way to say it was that it's more of a cooking "show" than a cooking "school". The doors opened at 5pm so you could check out the vendors, sample their product, buy their pruduct and entry their drawings. At 7pm the show began. The stage was set up as a kitchen with the cooking expert doing about seven recipes during the first hour. She takes a break and sets up for the second hour while they do drawings and raffles for things like bags of groceries, floral arrangements and full size kitchen appliances. The second hour was filled with another seven recipes with more raffles and giveaways. The first time we went my mom won a beautiful evergreen wreath but this year we didn't win squat. In fact, the bag full of freebies was a lot lighter this year than it was previously. Oh, well. We still had a good time and we actually saw some people we know! My Uncle's cousin Anita and my mom's neighbor Betty were just as surprized to see us as we were to see them.

Oh, and what was the most interesting thing I learned all night? If you've made your dish too spicy, add paprika to cut the heat.