Jill's Journal: Pumpkin pie just like mom made

Tonight, I’ll be putting my baking skills to the test by tackling a couple of pumpkin pies for our family’s Thanksgiving meal on Thursday.

I haven’t made a whole lot of pies in my almost six-decades of life, but fortunately, I can follow a recipe – or at least I think I can. I’ve been known to make a chicken pot pie from scratch, albeit the crust slides out of box I pluck from the refrigerator section of the grocery store. Not since my high school home ec classes have I rolled out a pie crust, and it’s a road I’m simply not going to steer my culinary hopes down.

The making of pumpkin pie – my favorite of all pies – had long been my mom’s job, that was until her passing just days before Thanksgiving last year. I don’t recall if we had pumpkin pie on the menu or not, as the holidays were somewhat of a blur as we began to navigate our lives without her.

While tears still line my eyes – most times, it’s the littlest things that instigate the waterworks – I’m confident that mom will be watching over me through the process. She did that – a lot – whenever I took charge of her kitchen. I still remember the time she told me that I wasn’t doing it the way she would do it. I also remember telling her that it really didn’t matter which way I did it, in the end, it was going to come out the same.

And, true to my words, surprisingly – and thankfully – it did.

Mom’s pumpkin pie isn’t the only tasty treat that I’ll forever miss. Her homemade bean soup is one that I haven’t been able to mimic so well – yet. And, there’s her cut-out Christmas cookies that she long took pride in making and delighted in watching us enjoy one, two, sometimes three cookies, at a time.

“Don’t eat them all right away,” she’d remind us, “or there won’t be any left for Christmas.”