Writing
There’s a category at karacooks called Recipes, where I tell you what to put in the pot and how long to cook it.
This isn’t that.
Writing is everything else: the longer reads, the essays, the food history, the kitchen disasters, the weekly Friday Roundup, the ongoing renovation of a fifty-plus-year-old house on a creek. Some of it is about food directly. Some of it is about the table the food gets eaten at, who’s sitting there, who isn’t, and why. Some of it is about my own kitchen, the small wins and the small fires. Some of it is about the world the food is being cooked in. There is no version of writing about food, for me, that doesn’t eventually touch on all of it.
These pieces are slower than the recipes. They take longer to write. They run longer when published. They ask more of you. And sometimes they make me uncomfortable in the writing, which usually means they’re worth doing.
This page is the front door. The threads run in different directions. Pick whichever one calls to you.
The threads
Friday Roundup
Every Friday. Reading, watching, eating, the garden, current events, whatever’s on my mind. The structure has become predictable in a comforting way, like a weekly letter to friends. New entry every Friday, with the occasional Saturday or Sunday when the week ran long.
What Got Lost
Food history rewritten to be accurate. Each post pairs a forgotten, distorted, or suppressed food history story with a loosely related recipe. The Monk Who Didn’t Discover Champagne. The Banana That Died. The Caesar Salad That Was an Accident. The Spanish have a legitimate claim. The French have better marketing.
Cooking
The act of cooking itself. Not recipes — essays about cooking. Why I have a Kamado Joe. The annual ritual of roasting thirty pounds of Hatch green chiles. Why I sous vide the Thanksgiving turkey. The relationship between cook, fire, and cast iron, and what twenty-eight years of doing this has taught me. Sometimes there’s a recipe attached. Often there isn’t.
Food & Politics
Because food and politics are not separate, and pretending otherwise is itself a political choice. Posts on food justice, sourcing ethics, current events as they affect what we eat, and the long history of who gets credit for what shows up on our plates. African American foodways, indigenous foodways, immigrant foodways, and the systems that try to obscure where the cooking really came from.
Personal
The non-food things, or the food things that are also non-food things. Family, place, memory, the people I’ve loved who I’ve lost, the people I’ve loved who are still here. Sometimes there’s a recipe attached. Sometimes there isn’t.
Our Creek House
Living in a fifty-year-old house on a creek in Alpharetta, and what that’s been like. The dream part, the flipper-reality part, living with water, the bathroom renovation, the barn, the garden, all of it. The house keeps revealing itself. Most of what I learn shows up here.
Travel
Where I went and what I ate there. Maine, Tucson, Jekyll Island, Austin, the desert road trip with Zach, the prairie trip to honor my Uncle Jim. Some of these are food-forward. Some are mostly about the place.
Restaurant Reviews
Honest reads on restaurants I’ve eaten at. No comp meals, no sponsored visits, no transactional reviewing relationships. If a restaurant’s in here, I paid for the meal like everyone else and I’m telling you what I actually thought. Includes the Atlanta favorites and the places I’ve found on the road.
Behind the Blog
How the work actually happens. The chaos, the photo outtakes, the pets in the focaccia, the hours per post that nobody sees. Behind the curtain of food blogging, including the parts that don’t go on the curtain.
Kitchen Disasters
The opposite of food blog perfection. This is where the things that went wrong live. The roux that broke, the dough that wept, the chiles I roasted without gloves once. Twenty-eight years of cooking has not made me immune to forgetting the butter. Lessons in here, and also a fair amount of laughing at myself.
Threads that cross threads
Some subjects don’t belong to one category. They cross. These are the ones that currently exist. There will probably be more over time.
- Sharon’s Recipes is a tag, mostly within Recipes but sometimes in Personal. My late mother-in-law’s food, honored properly. Banana bread, frozen whiskey sours, posole, pecan cheese ball.
- Nana’s California is a tag for the food and stories from my maternal grandmother (Irish-American, California, the artichokes the way my mother taught me).
- Meemaw’s Texas is a tag for the paternal grandmother stories (Texas, Southern, cornbread carved in stone).
- Kamado is a tag for everything that happens on the Kamado Joe, across Recipes and Cooking.
- Hatch chiles is a tag, mostly under Recipes and Cooking, for the annual ritual and everything that comes out of it.
Click any tag from any post and you’ll see everything tagged the same way, regardless of which category the post lives in.
Where I came from on all this
If you want context for why this section exists at all, the About page covers what karacooks is and where I stand on the food I write about. The short version: I’m a Texan in Georgia, I grew up Southern but also overseas, I have a history degree, I read constantly, I’m political, and I believe that honest cooking starts with honest history. The longer version is on that page.
If you want to know specifically what I think about credit, sourcing, food justice, and the things this blog won’t do, Where I Stand covers it.
If you want to know what I actually cook, Recipes is the door for that.
If you came here to read, pick a thread above and start. There’s plenty.