And so we begin ...

Welcome. Come sit with me, won’t you? Let's talk. I’d love to hear your stories.

If you were here with me now, we'd talk about food, yours and mine. If you were in my kitchen, I'd ask you to show me how you cook, to tell me who taught you and why it still matters to you (it's got to be more than carbs and protein).

If you were here with me, we'd take a lazy stroll through my neighborhood with Dakota, the dog. On warm days, late in the afternoon, when everyone opens their kitchen windows and begins to cook, the smells of my neighbors' worlds pour into the still air. And with the windows open like that, you can listen, too--Mandarin, Farsi, Spanish, French, Japanese, African dialects I can't name and a Texan somewhere nearby who likes barbecued meat and music low and twangy. We're all emigrants (or their descendants). Tucked deep into each of us are generations of culinary traditions. Eating is the grand experience we all share.

When I walk through my neighborhood, I wonder how my neighbors learned to cook. Was it from a parent or grandparent or maybe a favorite aunt or neighbor? Was it from an old cookbook (for Americans, was it The Joy of Cooking perhaps, or the Silver Palate, or maybe the Betty Crocker Cookbook for Boys and Girls?) or a treasured box of recipes on 3x5 cards? Were the recipes simply tucked into your family's heads and hearts and passed along warm hand to warm hand? Or, like some I know, did you or your kin just have an innate and exceptional ability?

Since you're there and I'm here, I hope that we can meet here every so often and talk about it all. I don't mean to be nosey; just curious. Tell me who and what and why and how and when, won't you? Telling me will soon become telling us. It might take us a bit of time to get a conversation going, but if we both show up, then all show up, we'll get there soon...

So then, how did you learn to cook?

For me, it started one day in maybe 1964, in our odd little kitchen on Redway Lane in Clear Lake City (Houston), helping grandma Belle make cheese enchiladas. Belle was dad's mom. She was half English and half Mexican. She and her sisters were quilters and cooks and sharp card players with wicked laughs (Belle's deep, smoky laugh was the clue that the game was over).

If you connected the dots, daddy's aunts linked Ottawa to LA to San Antonio and stretched deep into Mexico. Their heart lines were palpable along the roads they traveled getting to each other. In Houston, Belle had kin besides us: her brother Scott and our Aunt Frances. Hours away, in Comfort, Texas, Belle could find her favorite cousin, Palmer. You'll get to know these folks better as we go along. For now though, the story is Belle's and mine.

Belle made her enchiladas with ladles full of homemade red sauce, mountains of grated cheddar cheese (my job) and sweet yellow onions (all those tears!). I'd not seen that kind of cooking before--or perhaps I had and just wasn't paying attention. Belle settled a corn tortilla into warmed red sauce. When it was soft and supple, she'd set it on a plate and pile the cheese in a ridge and sprinkle those stinging sweet onions over it. She'd roll the tortillas into tight tubes. Several dozen could fit into a jelly roll pan. She'd let them set a while, then bake them. Those crisy edges and that oozing cheese were beyond perfect. (I still look for that flavor, so full of love, in cheese enchiladas in red sauce.)

From Belle's sous chef, I moved on to bigger, more important cooking adventures. My first achievement was pigs-in-blankets from the Betty Crocker Cookbook for Boys & Girls. Then, with that clearly mastered, I graduated to mom's collection of 3x5s, magazine articles, pages from brightly spattered cookbooks. Many of those are still on my shelves. Absolute treasures.

And now, what's your story? (Click on the comments and please, share!)