I remember that one afternoon, I was sitting in the living room. It was a hot, sunny day and the sun made me feel like I was sitting in the heat of a desert. I had nothing to do. But then, I suddenly got a great idea to try out. 

I wanted to pass some time and thought about how I would get to spend time with my mom and get a chance to not have my sister bother me. I then went and searched around online. I found something that was perfect and felt so excited to try it and that I sped into the kitchen where my mom was sitting and immediately showed her. I was jumping up and down when I told her what we should do. 

“Hey mom!”, I said excitedly.

“Yes?”, my mom said, looking up at me from her phone.

On my MacBook Air, I showed her the multiple cooking recipes I found that I wanted to make and the recipes showed simple steps on how to make them. I remember the recipe my mom and (mainly) I decided to work on together was to create our own hash-browns. 

I loved eating hash browns and I can still remember the time when I would walk with my siblings to a Dunkin’ Donuts a few blocks away and ordering a sandwich and donuts with 3 sides of hash browns. To me and my siblings, the hash browns were amazing. But, since everyone was now stuck at home in the first week of quarantine and the restaurant a few blocks away had closed down a few months ago, I decided that we should make our own. 

I had day-dreamed about how our homemade hash browns would look like and was excited to taste them. My mom helped with most of the work. She was the one who bought the ingredients, fried the hash browns, and cleaned up the kitchen after she finished frying while I did the preparations. She’s a much better cook than I am and since she works at a small restaurant that both of my parents own, she knows more about cooking. 

There would be a few mistakes here and there like accidentally having small pieces of shells on an egg I cracked or having the shredded potatoes turn pink. My mom would reassure me saying,”It’s fine. Don’t worry too much about it”. She would fix the problem and taught me how to cook better, making cooking more enjoyable. 

We had finished creating our hash browns and it looked better than expected. It was brown, crispy, bigger than the ones I use to get, and wasn’t too oily. I felt like I was drooling from how tasty it smelled and looked. I couldn’t wait to try them. Our first time making this recipe went well and my mom and I had a fun time cooking with one another. Even though the finishing product of the homemade hash browns didn’t taste as good as the ones I bought, it was still pretty good.

When I look back, I realize that this is a very special moment that I got to have only with my mom. I have many other moments like this but this particular one helped keep my mind off of covid-19 and realize how special my family is. It is like the saying,”You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.”