Few foods find themselves intertwined with the highs and lows of life. Chicken noodle soup is reserved for an illness. Chocolate cake is reserved for a promotion at work. Pumpkin bread fills all the in-betweens. Eating a slice of pumpkin bread gives me the ultimate food warm and fuzzies.
As the leaves turn from yellow to brown, the smell of homemade apple pie fills permeates my house. I love opening the door to the smell of butter, cinnamon, apple, and sugar. Apple pie lends a level of nostalgia to the holidays that makes the endeared Thanksgiving pumpkin pie jealous. I’ve heard what sound like fairy tales of my grandmother Ruth’s fried apple pies and her homemade apple pies. I never got to taste these fabled treats, but my mother has kept their memories alive. Unfortunately, she does not have the recipes to pass along – since no one expected her to die so young. The dollops of butter carefully placed on the top of this pie are an ode to the memory of my grandmother Ruth. According to my mother, I still haven’t perfected the amount of cinnamon.
A picture is worth a thousand words, or 774 to be exact, generated by the discovery of a cat wandering through the corner of a photo I accidentally took when learning how to use my tripod. After Thanksgiving 2021, I remember fiddling around with my new tripod and struggling with the 90-degree arm. I must have been testing the setup and lighting when I snapped this shot. After taking hundreds of photos while preparing a recipe, I troll through the kaleidoscope of images in Lightroom. I delete the pictures that are out of focus, to dark, or feature my son’s latest lego construction project. How this photo was not deleted, I do not know. But now that our beloved Bella has crossed the rainbow bridge, this photo has taken on new meaning.
As the rainy spring days fade away and the summer heat envelops the South, my herbs struggle to find enough shade and water to prevent wilting. A small snip here and there for a sauce, biscuit, or soup leaves my herbs looking like a four-year-old accidentally found a pair of kitchen shears. This chicken soup is packed with herbs from my garden and showcases some of my favorite herbs in the garden. While not as delicious as my mother’s chicken pot pie, this one will do.
For me, the Italian American classic weeknight dinner staple is inevitably intertwined with an orange cartoon cat. Perhaps the manufacturers behind Stouffers frozen lasagna had invested in the constant lasagna feeding frenzy present within nearly every Garfield episode in the late 1980s. If they weren’t behind all the direct consumer marketing, then they should have been because I requested lasagna more than my brother requested canned spinach (thanks Popeye). The lasagna of my childhood was mostly noodles with marina and a small amount of cheese and meat sprinkled inadvertently throughout the layers upon layers of noodle.
I accidentally made this pasta one night when I came home from work, a little late, and didn’t have enough time to make my usual marinara sauce. I also didn’t have any red wine around…but luckily did have an already open bottle of sauvignon blanc. I wouldn’t normally think to combine white wine and Italian sausage, but the Romans often combine guanciale with white wine to make an amatriciana sauce…so why not?
There is nothing like the perfectly brined and roasted chicken leg with the combination of crunchy browned skin on a cold winter night. This is a one-pot dinner that when cooked perfectly is just as masterful as leather fruit served in the shape of a beetle (RIP Noma). Just because a combination of flavors might seem mundane, doesn’t mean that a symphony of flavors can’t be created that only increase in complexity, and deliciousness, with time.
As a child, I assumed split pea soup was laborious and time consuming-which explained why my father enjoyed the Campbell’s canned version. However, I was delightfully surprised, when I made this soup for the first time, at how terribly easy it was to make.
