celebrating life's festivities through outings, eating, recipes, lore and libations

Our Story

I first entered my liaison with food through the frantic cooking of my wiry grandmother Violet. On the surface she was a curt and thrifty Scott, butcher by trade, wife and mother of tough men; loggers. Her sparse emotion and bristly nature was worn like a flak jacket.  Gushing declarations and kissing of cheeks wasn’t her outlet for love; an embarrassingly lavish spread of food, the bacchanal every Sunday afternoon from her shoebox of a kitchen in the crook of Skunk Hollow, Oregon was.

During the week she worked long hours in a grocer’s butcher shop standing for hours over carcasses in crisp Ked’s sneakers, breaking for cigarettes as often as the union allowed. She lived on coffee cut with artificial creamer, tobacco, oversized chalky pink mint lozenges and waxy Brach’s bridge mix. Real food she chased around her plate with a fork in an attempt to look like she was eating a meal. I can only guess at why she didn’t enjoy proper food, maybe it was a habit of going without from her youth when she looked after a hoard of little siblings in the lean years of a depression, new Americans. Maybe food for her became an expression of love and she never deemed herself worthy.

Every Sunday afternoon all sentiment for her sons and their families flooded tables and counters in the form of comfort food. Three meats anchored the buffet. Ham, beef roast cooked fork-tender and fried chicken were saddled with countless sides; peas floating in thick cream, bacony green beans, pale iceberg lettuce with baby pink shrimp and mayonnaise, flashy jello concoctions, macaroni salad studded with pimentos, devilled eggs, shiny topped yeast rolls with soft butter, mashed potatoes and gravy, cinnamon rolls, at least two kinds of pies, butterscotch chip cookies and angel food cake. Wine or beer was never paired with dinner, instead we drank Kool aid in frosty aluminum tumblers that stuck to your lips and freeze-dried coffee from a can for the grownups.

I am the first born female in four decades to the family name. Before my birth I was named John Henry, in the habit of only producing burly boys they hadn’t considered the alternate. I am the celebration of the first girl, heir to the cork boot dynasty. Because I was my grandmother’s blood and bone female legacy I was an exception to her emotional boundaries. She enveloped me with embarrassing favoritism. She doted on me and in the end, when her health was failing to cigarettes and sugar, she shared her secrets.

My first connection to the power of food, to its distinct relationship with each individual was planted in this place, this matriarchy ruled by the oven. From here I have surrendered everything to its clutches. I married food, I carry its weight. I left my first career in advertising for food and became a reluctant restaurateur with my husband the chef. Eventually there was a catering company, a second restaurant and a third; supposedly the last. I am now what pop culture calls a foodie but that term seems as light to me as a beige moth accosting a bare bulb, I am more a wooly mammoth slam-dancing a mirror ball. Food now embodies obsession and yes, love. It is my inheritance and I will do my best to not squander the wealth.