Food is supposed to bring people together.
It sits at the center of our holidays, church potlucks, birthday parties, first dates, family reunions and late-night kitchen conversations. In Texas especially, I feel like feeding people is one of the purest forms of love we know. We celebrate with casseroles, comfort with pies, and gather around smoked meats and shared desserts.
Food is hospitality. Food is belonging.
But for some people, food is also calculation.
Before the appetizers even arrive, some of us are already scanning ingredients, evaluating risk, rehearsing questions, and trying to determine whether asking those questions is about to make everyone at the table uncomfortable.

Read the full feature in On The Table in your Thursday Bowie News.

Long before we understood all the ways a woman can love her family, most of us understood it through food.
Love looked like a sink full of dishes and a mama still standing at the stove.
Love smelled like biscuits in the oven, chicken frying in grease, or something bubbling away in a dented old pot that had probably fed three generations before us.
The women who fed us did far more than cook.
They comforted us, celebrated us, and nursed us back to health. As a member of Generation X, I can ask someone my age how they spent a sick day at home from school. It typically involved a can of chicken noodle soup, saltines, a Sprite or 7-Up, and watching “The Price Is Right” with Bob Barker reminding us to spay and neuter our pets.

Mothers stretched tight budgets and somehow made supper happen whether they felt like it or not. They knew who wanted the corner piece, who hated onions, and who needed pie after a bad day without ever having to ask.

Read the full story in your Thursday Bowie News.

Top photo -Suzanne Storey’s Memaw Lenora Brown Burnett, shown in her kitchen.

There are faster ways to make lasagna.
You can buy the noodles. You can twist open a jar of sauce. You can scoop ricotta from a plastic tub and call it done. And listen, I have done it that way plenty of times.
No shame in a weeknight shortcut. Some days are built for survival, not scratch cooking.
But lately, I have been taking the long way around.
What started as a simple plan turned into something closer to a three-hour tour. Think Gilligan’s Island… except instead of coconuts and castaways, it was flour, goat milk and just enough determination to get myself in over my head.
And I happily got lost in it. It began with milk from Cherry. Yes, I named her. Cherry, the nanny goat, has absolutely no idea she is now part of an Italian dinner situation.

Read the full feature from On The Table in your Thursday Bowie News.