These are the recipes that made it. The ones that started with a spark — maybe from an old family card, a neighbor’s hint, or something we saw once and forgot the source — but they became ours.
They’ve been tested, changed, tasted again, and refined with a look from my wife — the kind that tells you everything you need to know about whether a recipe is right.
I was raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We live in a cabin in the northern Appalachians now, tucked in the woods, where the Laurel Highlands peek through the trees in winter. These recipes come from that place — a life lived with both hands, and food that’s honest.
Some of them are simple — rice, hamburgers, sweet potatoes — the kind of food folks might think they don’t need a recipe for. But if it’s been a while, or if you want to get it just right, a little direction can go a long way. These versions are here because they’ve been cooked again and again until they came out exactly how we like them — simple, dependable, and better than you'd expect.
I’ll keep posting more as they earn their place on this page. Feel free to try them, share them, make them your own — just like we did.