My mother-in-law makes the most amazing food. On my last trip to West Virginia, I made sure to observe what she does. My husband and his grandmother’s birthdays were coming up so she decided that we were going to have pizza to celebrate. Easy, right? Just call up the pizza parlor and order some pizza. That’s what I would have probably done.

Instead, she made dough, tomato sauce, cut some fresh veggies, and pizza making turned out to be an organic, family experience. Everything tasted so…fresh. I like how everyone got involved to help make the pizza. It made the pizza that much more tasty.

My grandmother-in-law is skilled at chopping vegetables and I love her waterfall of green chilli below.

My mother in law gave me some great recipes and ideas. One day I mentioned I was going to give Z some sweet potatoes so reached for the trusty Gerber Sweet Potato Jar. She said she’d just make me some fresh sweet potato. Within ten minutes, a sweet potato had been washed and microwaved by my mother-in-law, peeled by my aforementioned-amazing-chopping-grandmother-in-law, and Z gobbled it up happily.

Sadly, I did try this twice back home in Atlanta, but some reason, she didn’t like the way I made the sweet potato. Maybe I”ll attempt it one more time. I don’t have the magic touch.

What amazed me the most was how my mother-in-law doesn’t use cans. The tomato sauce she made for the pizza was made from fresh tomatoes (yum!), and she leaves a food processor on the counter for such purposes.  You can taste the difference.

(below are images of her homemade everything…apple cake, pancakes – last-day-special-in-West-Virginia , and more!)

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“And it is He who sends down rain from the sky, and We produce thereby the growth of all things. We produce from it greenery from which We produce grains arranged in layers. And from the palm trees – of its emerging fruit are clusters hanging low. And [We produce] gardens of grapevines and olives and pomegranates, similar yet varied. Look at [each of] its fruit when it yields and [at] its ripening. Indeed in that are signs for a people who believe” (Quran 6:99).