Welcome to Mama Snow Cooks and More blog site!
About: Mama Snow / Ms. Lam
I am a crocheter, recipe blogger, photographer, gardener, lifelong teacher, wife, and a mama of two little ones. This is where I share my work of love.
Mama Snow Cooks was originally created in 2017 to document pictorial recipes of my homemade food to share with my family and friends, to help me cook with a consistency taste since my eyeballing skills are terrible, and hopefully to help teach my little ones how to cook their favorite homemade food in the future. Then in 2019, I merged my other areas of hobbies and work into this site.
Mom is my inspiration to improve my Vietnamese cooking skill. My family fled the Communist Vietnam in 1983. Our boat floated on the vast Red 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. One of my goal in life is to master all the Vietnamese cuisines she made for us growing up. This is my little sunshine and my mom together.
About: Little Chef Grace Nhi
My daughter is my little foodie chef who loves helping me out in the kitchen since she was 14-months-old. She’s also an artist, a painter, a builder, a gardener, a talker, and a creative thinker with a great imagination. She hates puree food and started eating with us as soon she got four teeth at nine-months-old. She loves eating rice, fruits, and noodles.
By fourteen months, she learns how to use a fork, spoon, and chopsticks.
My cooking journey with my little foodie chef is full of fun teaching and learning moments for both of us. She got her very first play kitchen at 14-months, and I put it near my kitchen. She would go to her kitchen to pretend cooking whenever I am cooking in my kitchen.
Then one day, I asked 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 all 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 helping by lining up cupcake liners, pouring ingredients into a big bowl, mixing, shaking, and stirring ingredients. She learns 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 she was 21-months-old, she was in charge of helping mommy mix marinade sauces together.
Cooking time with my little chef is also teaching time. During the prepping and cooking process, I teach my toddler about colors, numbers and counting, patterning, sorting out and identifying fruits and veggies, and learning about the anatomy of an animal as she watches 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 cook with 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!
I hope you and your family enjoy our recipes. If you have read this far, thank you for your time stopping by our blog.
Mama Snow
