Let me put this out there…I am not a professionally trained chef. I was trained hanging on to my mom’s apron strings when I could barely toddle. My textbooks were stained recipe cards and recipes clipped from magazines, lovingly pasted to pages of notebooks by my young mother.

Tools of the trade included freshly picked produce from our gargantuan backyard garden and kernels of grain stored in big bins, ground for hours to make homemade hamburger buns, their yeasty smell wafting through the house when we poured through the front door rosy cheeked after school on an Iowan winter day.

It wasn’t that my parents had a ‘whole foods’ agenda, it was born of necessity and of a poverty-level food budget my family kept to. Now that I’m grown and have kids of my own, I realize the wisdom and health that comes from such living, and am grateful for the training my mom gave me while living under her tutelage.

Whether you’re a seasoned “from scratch” cook looking for new recipes for your arsenal, or the person in your family who is always asked to bring the canned olives to Thanksgiving dinner, I hope you will find a home here.

I promise to share with you my very best and favorite recipes, the ones that have passed the taste test of an over analytic cook (myself), a rich-foods loving hubby, and four kids with various levels of pickiness.

Welcome.