I had a completely fabulous mother. She was a pretty good cook, except that she was always so busy with her politics, and with being consigliere to her large family, and with talking to my dad while he was on his second job shift, that she almost never cooked dinner without a phone lodged between her shoulder and her ear. This resulted in many culinary tragedies, and seasoning mistakes. Here are two examples.
One day she was making her amazing chicken soup, loaded with carrots, and turnips, and leeks, and dill, not to mention the largest soup chicken she could find. When it came time to add salt, she grabbed what she thought was the large red box of kosher salt, but it was the similar-sized box of Tide.
Twice a year, (on Mothers Day and on her birthday July 7th), my mother used to pull out her favorite phrase and say, “Attention must be paid.”
I have been thinking about all the recipes of everyone I know and it is so funny and interesting the way their personalities play into everything so well and say so much. 
The press representative agreed to let me into the Courbet retrospective a day before the preview. My mother and I were in New York for a couple of days before heading up to Westport, Connecticut to attend a memorial service for her sister, my aunt Judy. Our visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art would be our own private memorial. 