In honor of Mother's Day, this is my contribution to BlogHer's Mother Knows Best series.

It seems most of us start off our lives blindly believing that our mothers know best. Then sometime during adolescence we are suddenly convinced that our mother knows nothing, and of course, we know it all. But, as we get older, we slowly come back to realizing that our mothers (in many cases) did know best. Why is that? Is it some kind of genetic programing? What ever the case, we almost all experience this phenomena in one way or another.

My mother is one of those intuitive cooks in the kitchen.  73 years old, and having raised six kids, she doesn't follow recipes anymore.  If you watch her while she cooks, the timing just appears to happen seamlessly.  Whereas I'm good for only making one dish at a time, mom can coordinate a whole meal for 8 - a main course protein, one or two veggie sides, a starch, and a salad - without getting remotely flustered.  She's always tasting whatever she is cooking, and adjusting the seasonings.  She cooks from memory and a well developed sense of what works together well, and how flavors come in balance.  

A couple weeks back, news about limited rice exports from India gave my husband and I -- both raised on rice-heavy diets -- pause. We briefly mulled over the idea of buying an extra bag of rice just in case, but then let it slide.

Last week, our weekly groceries bill leaped from an average of $40-$60 to $90+. Whoa! What did we just buy?

Or is it the food crisis that we hear about? So it's here?

Karina from Karina's Kitchen: Recipes from a Gluten-Free Goddess shares a fabulous and simple recipe she calls Roasted Vegetable Magic, and she wants to know what you pull together for dinner when you are hungry and tired.

Okay, so Moms are the real stars on Mother's Day but a close second? That would be the coffee cakes that take center stage on the tables of spring celebrations, whether a brunch, a family dinner, a late-day barbecue. I've collected some stellar coffee cake recipes from my fellow food bloggers. As good as these coffee cake recipes all look, well, look out, Mom, you've got some competition.

Food blog postings definitely come in cycles. I'm not talking about seasonal or holiday food trends, when everyone is cooking pumpkin or asparagus, or blogging events when all the Daring Bakers are making doughnuts. I'm talking about those unexplained trends, when suddenly you start to notice the same dish on lots of different blogs, and there doesn't seem to be any real reason for it. I was scratching my head recently, because it seemed like every time I checked on blogs in my feed reader, more and more people were writing about making pulled pork.