At the end of 2018, I left a sous-chef job in Asheville, NC, loaded up my car with all I could fit and gave away the rest of my belongings. I drove to Chicago with very little plan and about a thousand dollars in the bank. I spent the summation of a year traveling, living out of my car, staying with family, and the summer working in a national park, as a sous chef at several of their hotels. During this time I survived off of cafeteria food and lots of peanut butter. During stays with my family I would cook dinner for them in exchange for being allowed to eat dinner. 

In mid-November, I found myself in a rural college town in Missouri, visiting my sister and her new-born son. This was to be my last stop before I arrived back in Asheville for a couple of weeks. My siblings and I have a long-standing tradition of staying up late, sitting on the kitchen floor drinking and talking. The kitchen has always been a mutual place of gathering for us, whether in our childhood homes, or cramped together in tiny Atlanta or Chicago apartments. 

This space is a presentation of dozens of recipes that we’ve been working on over the past few months. I returned to this small town in Missouri, where I now work as a cafeteria cook. There is one regional grocery store operated out of an otherwise abandoned shopping center, and on the other side of town, a wal-mart. In the evenings, we’ve cooked daily, depending on the limited availability of the local market. We’ve cooked in the style of Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler, so many of these recipes have included leftovers from the night before. Ingredients from Monday will reappear on Thursday. We’ve cooked the way that most families actually do cook, which is what makes these recipes feel special to me. This is a documented journey of our humble feasts and our time in the kitchen, drinking and cooking and talking.