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.

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.

Lent has just ended and if you observed it in any way, strictly or somewhere in the middle, you probably felt it. That slow shift in how you cook, what you reach for, and how often you stand in the kitchen wondering what else there is besides peanut butter and pimento cheese. But there is something about going through a season like that that resets your perspective.
You come out the other side appreciating things you did not think twice about before, and sometimes you discover a few new ones along the way.
As a kid, the frozen seafood we ate came in a rectangular box and answered to the name fish sticks.
They were breaded within an inch of their life, cooked until vaguely crisp, and served with enough ketchup to make you forget what you were eating.
They were not great. They were fine, which for a long time was about the best you could say for most frozen fish. And that stuck with me.

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

See a shrimp ramen recipe (top photo) in On the Table this week.