tara alley

The first part of this story began with me reminiscing about my mother, her cooking and why it is the most real food ever. After writing Autumn, Cooking, Motherly Love: Part 1, I decided to invite my mom out to spend the week cooking with me. Before I share her recipes with you, I'd like to relay a few lingering thoughts I’ve learned from these experiences in the kitchen, with my mom. 

I’m going to dedicate this entry to my mom, my dearest, best friend in the world. My favorite memories from childhood are simple and often connected to three simple things: fall, my mom, and my mom’s cooking. My mom’s cooking, in my mind, is the most authentic, wonderful and delicious that I have yet encountered. I now live near L.A. where the wealth of restaurants in a one mile radius outweighs the number of people in my entire hometown, but I would rather have her cooking on any given day than that of a premiere restaurant with an award winning chef. I say all of this only because I absolutely cherish what she was able to accomplish in our home and in her kitchen on a meager budget and without a Whole Foods anywhere in the state. That’s sort of like a modern day miracle.  (Don’t tell, but I still don’t think she even knows what a Whole Foods is).

I’ll just put it out there to start with: minus the cabbage broth cayenne pepper (or the “please-kill-me-now?”) diet, I have given most food-life styles a fair shot. I did vegetarian for about four years. Did raw for awhile (I loved it, my stomach did not), and did every sort of variation of caveman diets, of carb/protein/fat ratios and of cooked/uncooked/baked/boiled/parched plans that are out there.  Some have made me feel better, some worse, some wiped off the pounds and some put them right back on, and some were a heck of a lot more enjoyable than others. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got a “thing” for eating plans. Like, it’s too confusing and certainly altogether too overwhelming out there when the whole wide world of food is fair game.

It’s strange to say that it was only six months ago that I ventured out from my beautiful ranch in Montana to the southern side of California and made a swap from rural to urban, country to city, ranch to condo and garden to supermarket. Super, emphasized. It feels like it’s been forever. It feels like I haven’t seen or felt real, solid dirt in too long. I miss driving along the dirt road and waving to farmers in their Carhartt bibs. I miss knowing that if I ever got a flat tire, the guy down the way would fix it. I miss walking a mile in any direction from my front yard without seeing anything but the great Big Sky.