Susan Kocay and Lisa Kocay on a Disney Cruise in 1999.

By Lisa Kocay

I grew up in a busy kitchen. I’d wake up in the morning and my mom would already be working, whipping up miniature quiches and petit parfaits for a breakfast catering job. When I would get home, she would still be cooking, chicken piccata for a private family dinner or assorted hors d’oeuvres for a corporate event. No matter what, she was always in the kitchen and our house always smelled of food.

I seldom saw my mother without her chef pants on. They were never plain, but always fun and eccentric, like her personality – wine bottles, cupcakes and even flying pigs were regular patterns. She paired the pants with a plain scoop-neck t-shirt in one color or another. Her outfits were more predictable than what she would be cooking that day because she was always trying new recipes.

My mother was always making new dishes and I’ve tried a vast assortment of her recipes. Though I have many favorites, there is one that remains special to me: Her triple chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.

She originally found the recipe online but adjusted a few aspects to make it her own. These cookies have chocolate chips, chocolate chunks, white chocolate chips and a touch of oatmeal for texture. We would bake them together, with me leaving a trail of flour behind. My father would always come into the kitchen and say, “you better not be making a mess in here,” though he knew well enough to expect one.

The two of us are quite the pair, with similar looks, personality and taste in food. Both of us are short, curvy, freckly and have strawberry blonde hair. Both of us eat way more uncooked dough than one probably should, guiltily dipping the spoon into the bowl for another taste saying, “the dough is even better than the cookie.” Both of us prefer to eat these cookies frozen, and we take turns making trips to the freezer to grab cookies to munch on while watching television on the couch together.

Growing up, I loved baking these cookies with my mom, except for the one time I had to bake 3,000 of them for one of her catering events. These cookies weren’t only reserved for her work, though. We’d bake them for ourselves, holidays, friends, birthdays, fiestas in my Spanish classes, anything we could find an excuse for. If I brought these cookies into school, I would get chased down the hallway by fellow students wanting one. They were well known, loved and often referred to by my friends as “Susan’s cookies,” my mother’s name.

When I left home to go away to college, my mother would send me packages of these treats. She would even send up extra for my friends because they loved them, too. I would sit in my dorm in Bethlehem, Pa., over a thousand miles away from my home in Sanford, Fla., and reminisce about being home with my parents.

I always craved these cookies but lacked the proper baking equipment to make them in college. When I graduated, I asked for only one thing – a Kitchen Aid mixer.

I was fortunate enough to get one, in light pink. Now in my tiny Manhattan kitchen, I bake these cookies myself. I bake them for myself when I’m having a tough week and need something to cheer me up. I bake them for my co-workers at the restaurant I work at, a low-key bribe for the runners in the hope they will sneak me some food from the kitchen in return. I bake them for my roommates, friends and classmates to show how much I care about them.

But most importantly, I bake them to remember being home with my mother. Though my Manhattan kitchen is much smaller than my mom’s luxurious and spacious professional kitchen in Florida, baking these cookies brings me home. I remember being young, not caring about my weight and gobbling down way too many of these cookies. And I remember visiting home in recent years, caring about my weight and still eating an obscene amount of these cookies with my mother. We once made the fatal mistake of adding miniature chocolate chips to the recipe, and they were so gooey with chocolate that I lost all self-control while eating them.

No matter my age, my favorite memory of baking these cookies is being with my mother. She’s my best friend and I mirror her in so many ways. Baking these cookies reminds me of being with her, and I miss her presence when I bake them now by myself.

They never seem to turn out as good when I bake them myself, but maybe that’s because they’re missing one ingredient: my mom.

Lisa Kocay