Vintage Kitchen for OKRA

I am so thrilled to be able to announce this: I have a food column.

While other middle school girls were descending into major crushes of New Kids on the Block, I was beginning to read Kathleen Purvis (I liked music but I didn't wallpaper my room with pics like one of my friends did). Purvis just happened to be the food editor of my local paper, but she was funny and informed and very honest, and I liked her. She was my food writer, my first food writer, though it was later that I realized that she is a really good and respected food writer. In short, she is beloved.

Well, today, I think back on that middle school girl. I have my own food column, which is different than just writing about food. A column is my personal voice, my personal platform, and I am happy that it has landed at OKRA.

My headshot for The Vintage Kitchen. Image by Leslie McKellar.

Click here to read my first full article as the "Vintage Kitchen" columnist for OKRA, an online magazine of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. Thanks to the mighty and magical photographer Leslie McKellar who is my friend and generously shot this piece. She makes me look good. But the food is the thing; it's always the thing, and writing about it makes me happy. Feeding you makes me happy too. Or just talking about how you feed others, so never stop telling me why you like it.

Acorn squash made me do it

Well, it's happened. I KNOW there are 1000s of food blogs out there, and I KNOW that a lot of people do them exceptionally well.

But I want in ...

I am jumping into the crowded end of the pool that is food blogging, and I don't care. I love food, writing, eating, writing about food, writing about eating ... and well, there you have it. And my sister Courtney provided the title, "from my little kitchen." It is little, in all its 1960s glory (including the stove) but we produce some great eats, and we don't even miss our microwave.

So ...

Last night, I finally moved past Squash 101. That's beyond crookneck (common southern yellow) and butternut squash, and I moved into the land of those gourds that you thought were just for decoration.

Barbara Kingsolver and her chapter on pumpkins made me do it. Holly Herrick and her effusiveness about the squash available at the market made me do it. And frankly, Harris Teeter made me do it.

There was a cute little acorn squash that was in season. It was a white acorn, one of the only I could find at my James Island store that wasn't grown in Mexico but in the U.S. (but still a very long train ride away). And it was pale and generally manageable, like that quiet kid in the back of the classroom.

I split it open, saved the seeds for roasting, and set upon cooking the thing. I was roasting chicken, potatoes (an obsession) so why not roast it? I added a pat of butter, a tablespoon of brown sugar into each halved cavity, and then I got frisky. Well, it was Sunday night and yes, there might have been some wine in the picture.

I sprinkled 4-5 dashes of Peychaud's bitters on each half. Jon Calo of the Cocktail Club said I could cook with it, so let's see, shall we?

What resulted was delicious, not too sweet with a complex taste that I am warming up now as I write. It was a little fibrous, or stringy, as we say in North Carolina, but it was good. I promise there'll be more pics in the future, but for now, imagine a rounder version of a butternut squash, roasted. I trust you get the picture.