When I got married, I had been cooking already for a while and I'd been baking for years. My high school was constantly having parties, and I always baked something to bring along. I got into cooking when I spent the year in Israel and somehow managed to not have dinner in the seminary dining room more than a handful of times.

Yet when my first Friday morning cooking marathon as a married woman came around, I frantically called my mother to find out how long I needed to boil eggs! The basics have a system. It's like a mathematical equation that you kind of just need to know before you hit the pots, no matter how intuitive you are in the kitchen.