The recipes gathered here are from my great grandmother and from my grandmother, their friends, neighbors, and others are regional recipes collected through the years. I have adapted them to make them easier to read and make. I also modernized them to bring them into the 21st century but the basic core of the recipe remains the same.

I remember watching great grand mother her feed her sour dough starter after she made bread, which she did daily. She called her starter Mike and always referred to it as her pet. Mike had been her starter all her life, it was the given to Grammy from her mother the day Grammy married Papa Paul, the man she loved until his death fifty years later.

Although Grammy’s Mike is long gone, the starter I use is from her original recipe. I also feed my starter after I make bread, which I do frequently. I also named my starter Mike in honor of Grammy’s Mike. This is where it all started for me, seeing and watching her obvious joy of cooking. I remember watching her knead the soft dough, helping her shape the loaves, the way the bread smelled as it baked and of course the joy of taking that first bite. Grammy loved the process of making bread and pastries the same as I do.

Grammy was a wonderful cook, she reveled in the joy of cooking and her French inspired meals were things of wonder.

Cooking to my grand mother Mattie was all business, cooking was a necessity to feed her family and it showed in her uninspired dishes, often overcooked and boring. Yes, Mattie was an awful cook. Sunday dinners at her house were ordeals of tough meat, soggy vegetables and lumpy mashed potatoes covered with bland gravy. Mattie had not inherited a passion for cooking.

Mattie had a passion though she was a baker. She baked glorious confections and pastries. Cakes so beautiful and wonderfully light, so good tasting you thought they came from a professional bakery. She also made flakey buttery pastries that melted in your mouth and made you beg for more.

I was 8 years old when I found my great-grandmother’s recipes and set about learning to make the French dishes the way Grammy would have made them. I used only the freshest ingredients available the same as she did and soon, through patience and perseverance my dishes far out shined Grammy’s. I had inherited her talent or maybe I just developed it in self-defense to Mattie’s cooking.

I cannot decorate a cake if my life depended on it, but my pastries on the other hand are a delight to behold. Buttery and flaky they melt in your mouth the way Mattie’s did and I can bake loaf after loaf of perfectly constructed, beautiful tasting bread.

We take or inherit traits from our kin. We develop passions for some things and drop others as being unimportant. We as cooks bring a love of food to our dishes along with the desire to feed our families. Our passions we develop along the way.

So what is your passion? What do you love to cook? If the creative act of making a dish makes you happy, the mere thought of feeling and smelling the ingredients brings you joy, you have found your passion. If your passion is dough, you are at the right place if your passion lies more in meal preparation and French inspired cooking then be sure to visit our friends at EZ Southern Cooking and let us bring out the "foodie" in you.