About

Welcome to our virtual kitchen!  While we currently live  in western North Carolina, we will be taking the blog on the road; stay tuned for details.   We enjoy cooking and for a number of years, we have shared our recipes in columns for two local newspapers. Throughout this period, we found that we really enjoyed writing up recipes and hearing comments from the people who try them, so we decided to use a more interactive medium to encourage this exchange with a wider audience; thus the appearance of this blog.

It seems appropriate to provide some indication of our food preferences to any of you who are unfamiliar with our recipes. We generally eat a healthful diet, but we are by no means food fanatics. Whole grains, leafy greens, and all types of veggies appear regularly on our table, but we also make room for bacon and other foods that aren’t quite as high on the health scale.

Few, if any, of our recipes include raw onions (that includes green onions, too), only because we don’t care for the taste. If you enjoy raw onions, please adjust the recipes accordingly. We’ve also noticed over the years that we seem to put red pepper flakes in a lot of things. More recently, we’ve also started using Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce which we enjoy in a number of dishes.  Cheese also makes frequent appearances on our table.

Our recipes, like those used by many people, come from a variety of sources. For any recipes that remain virtually unchanged, the source will be acknowledged in the discussion area of the site. Many recipes have been altered substantially to accommodate personal tastes. In some instances, we may have enjoyed the original recipe, but there were changes we thought would improve flavor, or texture.  Frequently, our recipes are created as we look at ingredients on hand, and decide to experiment. Any worthy experiment is written up, and will eventually appear here.

The starting point for this blog includes a list of recipes from one or the other of two cooking columns printed over a span of several years. The weekly columns in The Moultrie News (Charleston, SC) ran from 1997-2000, and semi-monthly columns in The Tryon Daily Bulletin (western North Carolina) cover 2006-2009. We will be adding new recipes on a regular basis, along with discussions of food, cooking techniques and tips, and general comments on favorite topics such as tailgate markets. We hope all of you will join in these conversations, and we hope you will also let us know if there are areas you would like to see discussed, or perhaps recipes for a type of food you would like to explore.

We look forward to seeing you on our site,

Merry and Allen