We will celebrate Father’s Day and Dad‘s 76th birthday tomorrow, a rare feat of the calendar, so I felt the need to cook up a small tribute to my father, the consummate Foodsmith.

After nearly 52 years with John Philip Raposa, his obsession with food, especially the baking business, has rubbed off on me. And, for that, Dad, I thank you.

Now, let me tell you a little about my father…

— He knows everything about bread and buttercream.  He can taste a birthday cake and tell you if the vanilla extract was old or — gasp! — cheap. His sister once served him a lemon meringue pie which he tasted and proclaimed the lemon “turpy.” As in it had “turned” and tasted like turpentine. However, he kept eating it, as he always does.

— Speaking of lemon, it’s our favorite flavor. We’d rather eat something lemon than chocolate, right, Dad? Oh, and cinnamon. We love cinnamon. And did you know that “Jews love cinnamon?” Dad told that little factoid to my friend, Judy, an Orthodox Jew, some 30 years ago and she still laughs about it.

— Dad also gave Judy a 50-pound bag of kosher cake mix for her daughter Rachael‘s bat mitzvah which forced me to drive to Harrisburg, PA for my catering gig. It was during the height of the anthrax scare so I certainly couldn’t check a bag of 50-pound white-ish powder at Logan Airport. Talk about a mitzvah.

— He doesn’t like cardamon.

— He’s my best sous chef. Not only does he keep his knives sharp and with a nice edge on them, he can use them. Also, it is better to have Dad work with me than watching every move over my shoulder.

— However, if my dough acts up, he knows how to fix it.

— He doesn’t bake.

— If you don’t use Ida Reds in your apple pie you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

— The minute I get through the door of his house, hands full of grocery bags, he’ll make a beeline for me and say, “Taste this.” The morsel of cookie or bread may be good. Or it may be bad. But you’d better have a strong opinion one way or the other.

— When I smoked ribs and pork butt for Fourth of July, Dad cleaned the greasy, grimy Weber smoker. Ditto when I made beer can chickens last year. How awesome is that???

— Dad likes to remind his sister, Claire, that one of the bakers he called on once asked him, “How’s your sister, Eclair?” The baker’s long dead now and she’s 62.

— He likes the Back Eddy‘s Apple Wood Bacon Wrapped New Bedford Scallops, so I’ll try to recreate the dish tomorrow for nine of us.

— Dad doesn’t trust people who don’t eat bread or sweets, but he will go all salesman on them and try to turn them around.

— And if I’ve served my father something that challenged his palate, he won’t say he didn’t like it. He’ll just say, “It’s different.” It makes me crazy, but I know he says it so my feelings won’t be hurt. But I know what “it’s different” means…

— But Dad always gets a free pass. Because after spending all day in and out of Rhode Island and southeastern Mass. bakeries during my childhood, he came home and savored my Susie Homemaker light bulb cakes topped with neon pink frosting like they were made by a Parisian chef pâtissier.

So Happy Birthday — and Happy Father’s Day — Dad, and thank you for giving this Foodsmith a taste of the good life!