Home: Loving to Cook and Cooking with Love

Tuesday, March 24, 2009, by Leigh Anne & Sherra

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We have designated Tuesday as a day where we will have different women share “Moments & Memories” in their lives.

We plan to feature women from all walks of lives – it may be in the form of an interview or as a guest writer. The column on Tuesday will be centered around our word of the month. We’d love to feature you as a guest writer. Qualifications: No experience necessary…just be willing to share a great moment or memory with other women. Send us an email and we’ll schedule a date. Our guest writers do not necessarily have to have a website or a blog as we want iLashGirls to be a place where every woman has a voice!

Leigh Anne and Sherra say…

Our Best Bites is a food blog that we’ve been following for some time now. We love the recipes and thoroughly enjoy Kate and Sara’s great great writing style. Be sure to visit their site and come back and leave a comment at the end of this article and tell us what recipe you’re going to try out! We are delighted to have Kate sharing her heart about filling her home with love and her love of cooking. Please welcome Kate to iLash Girls…

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Kate Randle Jones was born and raised in Logan, Utah. She attended Brigham Young University where she met and married her husband, fell passionately in love with cooking, graduated with a degree in English, had two babies, gently (and sometimes not-so-gently) nudged her husband toward his own graduation, and learned that managing apartments borders on the worst job in the world. She currently lives in Louisiana with her husband and two children.

Favorite color:

It changes on a regular basis. Right now, I’m saying orange.

Favorite food you associate with the home:

Chicken cacciatore

Pet Peeve:

Friend collectors on Facebook. Don’t send me a message saying you don’t remember me from high school, but you want to be my friend.

What is something that no one knows about you?

I’m a pretty open book, but I don’t think too many people know that I have some pretty mad detective skills. In fact, I’ve always kind of wanted to live a life of espionage; unfortunately, the FBI isn’t super-interested in people with degrees in English.

One word that describes you:

Relatable. Really, there have been about 2 people in my adult life I haven’t been able to carry on a conversation with.

What’s your motto or mantra:

Life’s too short to do something you don’t love.

What are the top three things that are most important to you—the things you love to do and are passionate about?

My family
My religion
Friends I love so much they have become like family to me.

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Home

I was recently making homemade Snickerdoodle ice cream where the recipe instructed me to temper some whisked eggs with a hot milk mixture before pouring that mixture back into the saucepan and heating it into a custard.

It reminded me of my sophomore year in college when my roommates and I threw a How to Host a Murder party and decided to have a rather lavish spread for dinner. The meal included asparagus with homemade Hollandaise sauce. There was a very ugly, panicky moment in the kitchen with all of us in our hippie outfits, trying desperately to impress our dates while salvaging the scrambling egg yolks. It made me think about how much I’ve learned in the 8½ years since then—not just about cooking, but also about life and the kinds of things I want for my own family.

My mom and dad were the parents of four kids. The first 3 boys and 1 girl were all spaced about two years apart. When my brother was 9, they found out that my mom was pregnant with me. It was quite a shock, to say the least, and one that kind of turned their world on its side. Once I was born and my oldest sister overcame her embarrassment that my parents had reproduced while she was in high school, they took quite a liking to me. Which was fun, sure, but even now, I am perpetually 4 years old in the eyes of my brothers and sisters. Additionally, my parents were so worn out by the time I came along that I didn’t get a lot of chances to bake cookies alongside my mom as a little girl.

When I was nine, my mom died. She had contracted rheumatic fever as a child and it had damaged her heart valves, ultimately, beyond repair. My dad remarried, and while I love my stepmom, let’s just say her favorite cookbook while I was growing up was one she had gotten from the local hospital—you know, since hospitals are always known for their stellar cuisine.

After my dad remarried, we were a family of 8 kids, 2 parents, and two other parents who were gone and rarely talked about. I longed for a “normal” family, one where step-anything wasn’t part of the equation. Like any family, we had our ups and downs, but 8 kids ranging a span of 20 years, a family consisting of stepmothers, stepfathers, stepsisters, and stepbrothers would be overwhelming to anyone. As crazy as things got, our one constant was dinner at 6:00 every night, and there were very few acceptable excuses (which proved to be quite a challenge on the nights we ate Halibut Surprise). I came to love that time together, to love that consistency, and it planted the roots for what I wanted for my own family.

Food has become my creative outlet. It’s my stress-reliever. It has become how I express to people that I love and care about them. My husband doesn’t understand why we almost always have meals that toe the line of fancy, or why I always bring food to friends; to me, it’s a tangible way of loving and nourishing people. Likewise, I will love almost any meal I receive from someone because it’s something I understand and appreciate—the need to take care of peoples’ basest needs.

I hope, as I raise my own children, that if they want to learn, I can show them the things they need to know to nourish their own friends and families’ bodies and souls, everything from frying bacon to tempering eggs. I hope they know that the meals I make for them are made with love and that it’s a good and worthwhile way to show love for others. I may be the mom at the DMV a few weeks ago who was passing a bottle of Sprite back and forth between her two kids, one of whom was wearing two different shoes, the same child with a never-ending runny nose that was eventually wiped on her dress. There may be things that lie in our future that will prevent my own family from being the “perfect” family I longed for growing up. But I hope that, come what may, they have memories of smells from the kitchen, that their favorite recipes will be mine, that maybe I’ll leave a legacy in their minds and hearts that started with some garlic, a little olive oil, and the dinner table.

Don’t miss Kate’s recipe for Snickerdoodle Ice Cream and other fantastic recipes that she and her friend and blog partner Sara serve up every week at Our Best Bites!