"How do you know what time to bung the turkey in the oven?"  Ari, 15, asked last Thanksgiving.

"I set my alarm so I get up to start it brining, I go find the right herbs, I send one of you to look for the big roaster I haven't seen since last Christmas, and I pray it's not too big, again, to fit in the pan," I told him.

"You have no clue, do you?" he asked.

"Not one."

In a perfect world, tradition and advice would be handed down from one generation to the next, like family china or male-pattern baldness.

In our family, my mother's inimitable cooking skills have leapfrogged right over me, and landed on my younger son.

While his elder brother thinks I will find inspiration in being asked, "What did you melt cheese on tonight?", Ari opts for encouragement; a few weeks back, he slid into his place at the table, and promptly announced he was giving me five points for plating.

 For non-foodies, these are confusing times. When I was a kid, mustard was mustard. The yellow stuff in the fridge door, not the selection of fancy jars I now keep, waiting for Ari to tell me which one the recipe is calling for. The same vinegar I wash the floor with went on the french fries, into a salad and made dill pickles. Simpler times called for simpler measures or, as my mother used to do, no measures, making replicating her culinary prowess that much more difficult.

She would spend a whole day making pies. Wanting to help, she would give me a blob of my own to work with. In the time it took her to make half a dozen pies from scratch, I would rework a single piece of pastry until it was grey and tough. When we were done, I would cover it in her homemade jam and roll it up to be baked alongside her creations. When my father got home, he would eat the jam roll up and pronounce it "wonderful." And you wonder why I am so misguided now.

I buy little jars of things, and when they're close to expiry, I throw the stuff into omelettes. You can hide anything in an omelette, as long as you toss enough cheese in after it. Artfully array the plate with homemade hash browns and toast, and you get full plating points even though you're passing breakfast off as dinner.

The Poor Sod and I were watching some show the other night as a chef was dusting some dish with truffles.

"Why is he shaving chocolate over that pasta?" he asked me.

"Nah, it's mushrooms," I told him. "It's one of those stupid things where one word means two really, really different things, and getting them mixed up can be a bad thing. I never know which one they mean until I see it.

"All the crazy words in the English language, and they can't come up with a separate one for mushrooms and chocolate?" he asked me.

"It's bad enough that I won't order anything in a restaurant with the word "truffles" in it ... sometimes it's just not smart to guess," I continued. "But, when I was away recently, they left a truffle on my pillow each night at the hotel. That was cool," I mused, remembering the fleeting bliss of finding something other than cat hair on my pillow.

"A mushroom?"

"No, the chocolate kind ..."

"A chocolate covered-mushroom?"

I went downstairs to wash the floors with raspberry vinaigrette.

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