One thing I realize the older I get is what a great cook my mom was while I was growing up. She had all the classic recipes under her belt and had a great kitchen and the tools to help her delivery food the Iron Chef would have been jealous of.

One of my favorite things my mom used to make was chocolate chip cookies. She would always cook way to many cookies for the family because she knew my brother and I liked giving them to our friends at school and around the neighborhood. Everyone would ask for the recipe and luckily I still remember most of it:

* 1 cup butter, softened
* 1 cup white sugar
* 1 cup packed brown sugar
* 2 eggs
* 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* 3 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 2 teaspoons hot water
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
* 1 cup chopped walnuts and/or raisins

I used to help my mom put all the ingredients in her electric mixer and she would let me control the mixer buttons. Of course I always made sure to taste test the cookie dough before it went in the oven… just to be sure it was worthy of becoming cookies… really I just liked the cookie dough almost as much as the cookies.

Recently I’ve been into cooking and I realized I don’t really have any of the handy cooking tools my mom uses. So the first thing I was told to purchase is a mixer because you use it for so many dishes. My mother in particular uses the Hamilton Beach® Mixer I checked out Hamilton Beach’s website and found the awesome Hamilton Beach® Stand Mixer. This Eclectrics® Mixer is so tough it can mix 9 dozen cookies and 4-1lb loaves of bread. My mom’s old mixers only had 3 or 4 different blend settings. This one has 12 settings which is more than enough for me. I decided on buying a quality mixer because I am going to only buy restaurant quality appliances for my kitchen.

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