People say you are what you eat. If that’s true, then I’m probably about 30 percent mashed potatoes, 20 percent homemade gravy, and whatever percentage is left over from decades of birthday cake, summer picnics, and bar food.
I grew up in Pennsylvania, where dinner (or supper as we called it) wasn’t just a meal—it was an event. If there wasn’t enough food to feed three extra friends or relatives who might stop by unexpectedly, something had clearly gone wrong. Butter wasn’t considered an ingredient; it was a food group. And every family recipe came with at least one heated debate over who made it “the right way.”
Then, at 19 years old, I packed up and moved to California.
Suddenly, people were putting avocado on everything, eating sushi without cooking it first, and talking about kale as if it were a celebrity. I had gone from scrapple and pierogies to fish tacos and bean sprouts. It felt like moving to another country—one where the vegetables were suspiciously colorful and nobody seemed to own a casserole dish.
This book is a collection of the meals, recipes, and memories that shaped my life over the past sixty plus years. Some dishes made me smile, some made me question my parents’ judgment, and a few are probably better left in the past. But every one of them tells a story, because the best recipes aren’t just about food—they’re about the people who shared the table.
