Inspiration for us all

When you reach an age where you don’t want to have all of the candles on your birthday cake, you can think that it’s all downhill from here. But this story proves that it is never to late to start something new. A Latrobe, Pennsylvania woman has became a Facebook sensation for her cooking and baking videos at the age of 97.

The videos came at the suggestion of her daughter’s friend, and Mary Ellen Raneri ran with it. She posted a video on Facebook of her 97-year-old mother, Lucy Pollock, baking one of her tried-and-true recipes. That video led to a Facebook page titled “Baking With Lucy” that served as a way to offer encouragement to others during quarantine and to connect with people that could no longer come over for dinners.

Six months after the initial video, Pollock cooks and bakes for 24,000 followers in the kitchen of the home she shares with her daughter and son-in-law. Mary Ellen’s husband, Phil Raneri, wields a cell phone to capture the videos as Pollock leads viewers through the recipes or chats about other cooking and baking topics.

Pollock chooses the recipes from among old family favorites, finding gems that she thinks people will like. The recipes are not complicated or expensive to make, because as the nonagenarian says, “I want to make it simple for people who haven’t cooked a lot.” In addition to the videos, Pollock now has a cookbook in the works.