Give me your hungry, your nostalgic, your food-loving masses yearning to feed free....

Welcome to my blogging enterprise. An enterprise wholly unrelated to any sort of starship, but instead devoted to food, cooking and the strong bonds of nostalgia that tie us to our kitchens (well, me, anyway). This blog is about my experiences and family traditions -- both the family I was born into and the family I am making with my husband and dog as we start out in our first home together -- and how those memories inform and inspire the food that comes out of my kitchen.

While I certainly believe in the beauty of everyday things (and meals!), your average Tuesday night pasta dinner will not be the focus of this forum. This space is dedicated to the foods that I grew up eating that are tethered to the best of my life's memories and formative experiences, as well as those recipes in my adult repertoire that are taking their rightful place in the Pantheon of Dishes That Matter To Me.

Pierogies on Christmas Eve, a few of which always showed up cloaked in Saran Wrap in my aunt's stocking the next morning. The time Mom went through a phase of cooking only chicken in a sun-dried tomato cream sauce. Those years in the late 1990s when I was a single girl living in Chicago with a kitchen that was barely larger than a dinner plate where all I seemed to make was baked ziti. The pancakes I've been flipping for my nephew during the past year. All delicious dishes, all infused with love and happiness and memory and acknowledgement that life is, and always has been, good.

I don't live in a house with a kitchen and a stove. I live with a stove that has walls and floors and ceilings built around it. First comes the food, then everything else that we build that is right and enjoyable and meaningful in life. Always a fan of metaphor (and hyperbole), this blog represents the overwhelming importance of food in my life -- to the exclusion of shelter itself. Kidding.

Maybe.

PS. The South Bend stove after which this blog is named is a six-burner, two-oven commercial beauty with a griddle and a salamander. When we first looked at the house, after I saw the stove, I didn't need to see the other rooms. My husband correctly observed, "We bought a stove with a house around it." The stove is so beloved it's earned a nickname: "Stoveria." As in, "gelateria" or "pizzeria" or "house that specializes in its stove -eria."