Introduction
Mama Snow Cooks blog was originally created in 2017 to document pictorial recipes of my homemade food to share with my family and friends and to help me cook with a consistency taste since my eyeballing skills are terrible. I like creating pictorials because I want to encourage young children to read with picture clues and motivate parents to involve their kids during cooking time.
In 2019, I decided to merge my photography portfolio, teacher website, and crochet site together since maintaining multiple non-profit websites can be costly. My website is different than most others because my goal is to make it a safe and kid-friendly site as much as possible. My blog will NEVER EVER have any embedded annoying pop-up advertisements or random ad boxes that appear out of no where. It makes it a very confusing and distracting thing for the little readers and viewers.
About Ms. Lam (Mama Snow):
I am a crocheter, photographer, gardener, lifelong teacher, recipe developer, wife, and a mama of two little ones. This is where I share my love and passion for teaching, cooking, crocheting, creating, and traveling.
Right now, I focus on creating pictorial recipes of my family cooked meals and documentaries of plants in my little garden. If you have decided to use my recipe to learn to cook something, thank you for allowing my little chefs to guide you through the step-by-step cooking process. Since I do not embed any annoying pop up ads on my blog site, I sell plants and seeds online and offer local photoshoots to help me cover the expenses for my hobbies and maintaining the active status of this blog site. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. Happy cooking and gardening! – Mama Snow
About my Family & Mom:
My family fled the Communist Vietnam in 1983. Our boat floated on the vast South China Sea for four days and nights, not knowing where we would end up. A rescue ship spotted us and took us into a refugee camp in Indonesia. In 1984, my family came to the United States. Mom raised my siblings and I to be responsible U.S. citizens. Mom is my inspiration to improve my Vietnamese cooking skill. One of my goal in life is to master all the Vietnamese cuisines she cooked for me growing up.
About Little Chef Grace Nhi:
My daughter, Grace, loves helping me out in the kitchen since she was fourteen-months-old. She’s also an artist, a painter, a builder, a gardener, a talker, and a creative thinker with a great imagination. When she was a baby, she hated puree food and started eating with us as soon she got four teeth at nine-months-old. She loves eating rice, noodles, pastas, and fruits.
One day, I asked Grace if she would like to “help” mommy cook. Her face lit up like fireworks; thus, marking the beginning of our cooking journey together. She loves to help. The help of a baby transitioning into a toddler means many spills and mess to clean up, and more things to wash, but that’s okay. One thing important I know as a teacher is to never turn a child’s help down and to encourage any help when they are eager to help. Chef Grace started out by lining up cupcake liners, pouring ingredients into a big bowl, mixing, shaking, and stirring ingredients. She learned to shake in seasonings to make her first roasted vegetables. She hates vegetables but she will give any food she makes a try first.
By the time Chef Grace was 21-months-old, she took charge of helping mama mix marinade sauces. Cooking time with my kittle chefs is also teaching time. During the prepping and cooking process, I teach my kids about colors, numbers and counting, patterning, sorting out and identifying fruits and veggies, and learning about the anatomy of an animal. Chef Grace watched me dissect a shrimp, eel, fish, chicken, duck, and maybe a frog someday. Oh there are so much that a child can learn just by cooking with mommy. Our attempt to prep a live eel once failed but she learned and remembered her experience with the word “slimy” and “slippery”. I didn’t even know the eel’s skin is slimy either. It was our “experimental cooking” and it’s okay if the experiment wasn’t quite successful as expected. Besides cooking and experimenting ingredients to stir up new dishes, we big and little foodies love to explore new food choices by eating out!
About Chef Ethan Gia-Bao
Chef Ethan Gia-Bao started helping Mama Snow in the kitchen at 14-months-old. He has his own way of helping and is still learning to observe, listen, and follow directions. He gets excited whenever he helps to cook. As long he gets to stir, pour, mix, dump ingredients into something, he will try to take part whether I let him or not. He makes a lot of mess and his favorite part in the kitchen is when he gets to mess with water.
