This is the section for the human stories behind the kitchen, and for the not-just-food work the blog does alongside everything else.
Family. Pets. Grief. Year reflections. The trips that mattered. The people I miss. The dog who showed up and stayed. The cats who run the household. The complicated business of being alive long enough to have a history with the food you cook.
If you’ve read karacooks for a while, you’ve already met some of the recurring characters. Carol (my mother, who died in 1999, and whose recipes I still cook). Jerry (my father). Meemaw (my paternal grandmother, who taught me cornbread is carved in stone). Nana (my maternal grandmother, the California branch). Sharon (my mother-in-law, who I stayed close to long after the divorce). Uncle Jim. My cousin David. Zach, my partner, who has somehow turned into the comic foil in most of these posts whether he meant to or not. And the animals: Remy the pibble, Callie the torbie, Finn the orange cat who is exactly the right amount of orange.
This is where they live.
What goes here
Posts about:
- Family. The people who shaped how I cook and how I think. The ones still here, the ones who aren’t. The ones I see often, the ones I see rarely.
- Pets. Remy, Callie, Finn. The introductions, the ongoing chaos, the occasional grief. Pet posts as their own category may eventually make sense, but not yet (see P.P.S.).
- Grief and memory. The people I’ve lost. Carol. Sharon. Meemaw. Uncle Jim. The food that keeps them present, the moments that bring them back, the work of carrying them forward without drowning in it.
- Year reflections. Year-in-review posts, hello-the-new-year posts, the looking-forward and looking-back essays that show up in late December and early January. They’re a tradition now.
- Travel that meant something. Not the gear-and-itinerary posts (those are Travel); the trips that did emotional work. The Tulsa trip with David. The Austin solo trip. The Tallgrass Prairie visit. The Maine love story. When the trip is the subject, it’s Travel. When the trip is the doorway into something else, it’s Personal — sometimes with Travel as a cross-cut.
- Bigger life-stage essays. Marriage, work, body, midlife, the various adjustments of being in your fifties. The pieces that take longer to write because I have to figure out what I actually think before I write them down.
- Holiday meals and the rituals around them. The Holiday Menus themselves live in their own section, but the Personal cross-cut on those posts is what makes them more than just menu archives.
What does NOT go here
Personal is not the default for “anything that involves my life.” Just like Cooking isn’t the default for “anything that involves cooking,” Personal isn’t the catchall for “anything with feelings in it.” The discipline is the same.
Recipes with family connections don’t automatically go here. A recipe post that mentions Mom or Sharon or Meemaw is a Recipes post first; Personal is a cross-cut only when the family thread is doing genuinely load-bearing work, not when it’s just the headnote. Sharon’s Banana Bread is Recipes + Personal because the recipe IS Sharon’s; a recipe I learned from watching Mom that happens to include a Mom anecdote is just Recipes.
Cooking essays with personal flavor don’t go here. The Hatch chile marathon, the eight-pies Thanksgiving, the Kamado journey — these are Cooking posts. They have personal weight, but the primary work is the cooking, not the human story.
The Holiday Menus themselves don’t go here (they live in Holiday Menus). Personal is a cross-cut on those posts where the meal has personal significance beyond the menu design.
Travel posts don’t default here. Travel posts default to Travel. Personal joins when the trip is doing personal work, not just travel work.
The test: is the primary subject of this post a person, a relationship, a year, a grief, a life-stage, or a meaning — or is the primary subject something else that happens to have a person in it? If the former, Personal. If the latter, the category that fits the primary subject, with Personal as a cross-cut only when it earns its place.
Why this section exists at all
The honest answer: because I write about being a person who cooks, not just about cooking. The food is the through-line, but it isn’t the whole story.
I write about losing my mother because that loss shaped what’s in my kitchen. I write about Sharon because she gave me recipes I still make. I write about Remy because he sleeps under the table when I’m chopping vegetables. I write about the Tallgrass Prairie because Uncle Jim and the prairie and the Osage Nation and my own family history are tangled together in a way that food doesn’t quite touch but is also somehow always present.
The recipes are why most readers come. The personal posts are why some of them stay. Both are real karacooks. Both belong here. This section is where the second kind of work gets a home of its own.
P.S. If you wandered into karacooks looking for a chili recipe and you’ve ended up reading about grief, family, or fifteen-year-old dog stories, welcome. That’s a karacooks experience. The blog is a food blog and it’s also a record of a life — mine, the people in it, the years going by — and you are welcome to as much of it as you want. Read what speaks to you. Skip what doesn’t. Come back next week and read something different. Honestly, I’m just glad you’re here.
P.P.S. The pets may eventually get their own category. Remy, Callie, and Finn are each going to accumulate more content over time, and at some point three named-character archives may earn their own home. For now there’s not enough volume to justify the structural overhead; pet posts live in Personal, and each animal has their own tag for cross-cutting findability.
P.P.P.S. Yes, I know “the orange cat who is exactly the right amount of orange” is not a real descriptor. It is, however, the only correct descriptor for Finn. I stand by that.