Hello Dear Reader,
My name is McKenzie. I am 30 years old with a loving husband and the cutest 3 year old son in the world (and I will fight about that fact). I graduated from Columbus Culinary Institute at Bradford in 2013 with a love of food & baking.
If you asked me 13 years ago what my dreams were I would have told you I wanted to open a bakery and make cupcakes. (Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen) instead, we live in an apartment built in the 1970’s and I work in a call center. We never can predict how life will turn out :)
I grew up in a family who loves food, and the best part of holidays were sitting around a table sharing casseroles and making jokes. My family, by all accounts, is nothing extraordinary at first glance, but I know there is so much more to the people I love and I want to share it with everyone.
Everything in life usually starts with love or death- strong feelings that encourage action and movement. My love for cooking and baking started from love; the love from my family. The love for my dad for letting me help him in the kitchen and explaining the science behind the way food works. The love my mom shows in her love language of gift-giving, trudging through the snow to the neighbors house to bring them a cake with patiently piped homemade icing. My sweet grandma’s love for Christmas and all the Christmas Cookie Baking Day’s she invited me too where we’d spend an entire day knocking out our favorite cookie recipes or trying something new. Always letting my grandpa sneak into the kitchen for his “test cookie”. (He had to make sure they were up to par before we gave them away!)
Unfortunately for me, this blog starts with death. My sweet Grandma Sue Maddux passed away in May this year. She was a kind woman who made friends everywhere she went, she loved to cook and travel. She loved to watch game shows like Family Feud or Jeopardy. She enjoyed a good margarita, holiday dinners, and her cats. Looking back it’s easy to see how my grandma had so much love to give away she was practically bursting at the seems.
For my brother’s birthday this year he asked if I could make him my Grandma’s Texas Sheet Cake recipe. I happily said yes, because who doesn’t want to eat a delicious chocolate cake? Five months after my grandmas passing, I was in our kitchen making this cake, drowning in feelings about missing my grandma. It made me start thinking about the amount of recipes I have had over the years from family that I always look forward to. Coleslaw at summer cookouts, corn casserole on thanksgiving, sweet and spicy cacciatore, ribbon jello salad at Christmas. It made me think about my Nan (my mom’s mom) telling me about an orange cake she had in her childhood, a recipe from when my great grandpa was a cook on a Navy ship, lost somewhere over time with zero success at replication. It made me think about someday, someone else I love will pass away, and recipes may go with them. It made me think that someday, I may not be here, and my son might want a recipe of mine that I never bothered to write down. It was at this point I decided to write down every family recipe I could get my hands on and make a book.
It feels like perfect timing as we enter the holiday season, writing down casseroles and jello salads. Accosting my family members, both immediate and distant, if they’d be willing to send me a recipe they love to add to a book so it can be passed down. Testing out recipes from my great grandma Boots who passed away in 2022, left in a box and given to my Nan. So, if you’ve made it this far, I hope you stay and join me on my adventure to acquire, write, and test recipes from every corner of my family. I hope I encourage you to write down your recipes and share them; because there is no such thing as a secret recipe, only a forgotten recipe.
For this blog, and hopefully my future family cookbook, I want to dedicate it to my Grandma Sue. You left so much more than just a house and memories behind.
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