While both my parents have an arsenal of delicious dishes, cooking was my dad’s passion. On most Sundays (hunting season excluded), he’d spend the day “piddling” in the backyard and cooking something low and slow on the stove. He taught me how to stir a roux (though my inattention led to one hell of a blister, but better to burn yourself than the roux?), how to cook fresh vegetables (either raw with salt and pepper or smothered with lots of ham, there was rarely an in-between) and he once sent me a jambalaya recipe with beer drinking as its primary measurement of time (cook the rice for at least two beers, maybe more, there’s nothing worse than undercooked rice). His mother, whom we lost this past August, was the quintessential Cajun matriarch reigning over her avocado-green oven topped with a simmering chorus of cast iron and Magnalite. When she grew too unstable to stand by the stove, she took on a veritable executive chef status, doling out orders to us lowly line cooks from a watchful perch.

With the weight of generations of culinary Boudreauxs, cooking comes down to one thing for me: creating. And creating is definitely something my mom taught me. The definitive troop-leader/room-mother type, she had a closet (and eventually a whole room) full of different craft and sewing supplies. For school projects, a trip to Michael’s was never necessary, we just dove into the dozens of Rubbermaid shoeboxes and made whatever we needed out of the random assortment of pipe cleaners, googly eyes and pom-poms. This process not only instilled in me a deep love for hot glue guns, but a sense of resourcefulness and creativity I tap into in the kitchen and almost all other aspects of my creative and working life. In the kitchen, mom’s highlights for me are her mean pot of red beans as well as a weeknight tray of cornflake chicken and she’s a loving baker, especially during the holidays, a role I’ve proudly taken on in my own marriage.

So here Mark and I are: married with a shared passion of eating, cooking and talking about eating and cooking. Join us as we attempt to put all of this into words!