I have hundreds of cookbooks. Literally. It’s Mom’s Fault (thanks, Mom!) I’m a cookbook collector, or maybe even a cookbook pack rat. It might be a bit of a sickness. I’ve tried to slow it down, but for a while there, I was on a […]

My Mom always hated January. Too cold. Too damp. Too boring. This is the first post in a series: January Dreaming.

Paul Prudhomme’s cookbooks started a family tradition, and K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen is part of it.

Family-memory stories gain a patina with age and become the stuff of legend. The Story of Chicken is one of those stories.

My dad was born 80 years ago today in West Texas as the Great Depression was coming to an end in the shadow of another Great War in Europe, a time before regular Americans realized we’d be involved in that war. With that backdrop and […]

An elegy for three, from the one remaining. They live in my heart-theater, their voices all trumpets and whispers and hugs.

Business trip serendipity. Fireworks and haiku. Memories. Good times. Edinburgh rocks.

For people like me, there’s a sense of loss from the abrupt ending of Anthony Bourdain’s huge contribution to the canons of travel, food and cultural understanding, and a reluctant but absolutely unavoidable comparison to our own unwelcome experiences with the savage, raw, rollercoaster aftermath of suicide.

It seems like yesterday that I was creating this post, Happy New Year! and looking ahead to 2017, and now here we are again, at the brink of yet another new year. I look forward to sharing and connecting with you all in 2018 via the […]

My grandmother “Mema” fed us in classic grandmotherly style: something was always just out of the oven, just for you. Here’s her legendary yeast roll recipe.

Thanksgiving weekend, eight of us family members spanning three generations packed into my Honda Pilot and headed down to the Bolivar Peninsula where I grew up.  We were on a mission to visit Dad’s favorite restaurant down there, and remember him. It was a perfect […]

50-year old photographs celebrate the birthday and memory of one who left us too soon: Steven Thomas Harvell.

Reconstructing Grandpa in the museum of my heart – a poem in memory of an amazing man, Thomas Carlyle Holt.

I have never said this in a public forum: my brother’s untimely death four years ago was a suicide. Hear my plea: if you’re hurting, please tell someone.

A treasure trove of family photos includes some from my 6th birthday.

Labor Day weekend of 2000 was the last time I saw my Mom; we shared cherries and empathy at the beach house on the Bolivar Peninsula.