Welcome

Perhaps this blog began twenty years ago, when I was seven. My family lived in Iowa, and each summer my mom planted a garden in the backyard. She grew many different vegetables, but I only remember the tomatoes - two rows, standing tall along the fence line, soaking up the sweltering Iowa humidity that made the corn grow beyond my shoulders by the fourth of July. While she crawled around on the ground, I would stand behind her and wait until her eyes left the fence. Then I'd pluck the ripest one I could find, plunge it into my mouth and chew the piece like an apple.

"It's officially summer," she said, catching me in the act. Smiling, she stood, up, picked a tomato of her own and joined me.

Or perhaps the story began the summer I was sixteen and traveling the country on a baseball team. Lonely for home, I ordered "home style" spaghetti and meatballs from more than a dozen restaurants in Tennessee, West Virginia, Kansas City and Florida.

People pay to eat this meal, I thought. But it's not as good as what I get at home.

Or when I was twenty-two, living in my own apartment and cooking for the first time in my life. My roommate showed his recipe for a quick pasta sauce (threw oil, garlic, two tomatoes and dried oregano in the blender). I watched it form a puddle underneath my noodles, and felt emptier after eating than I did before.

Then again, this blog probably started around the turn of the century, when my great grandmother sailed to New York, settled in Philadelphia, raised more than a dozen children on a vegetable and chicken farm and fed them the only food she knew. Four generations later, I want to know it, too.

In any case, I invite you to join me as I research, experiment with and eat memorable food. Together we'll cook (probably incorrectly at first) meals like pasta fazole, the family ragu, baccala salad and oi oi, just to name a few.