My cooking skills were born of necessity.  Being the only girl-child in a family with two working parents,  the culinary responsibilities were mine.  We were down-and-out in those days and my cooking was appropriately white-trash.  Wish the concoctions could be called something cool like ‘soul food’ or ‘low country cooking’, but it was really poor-white-folks cookin’.  Beans with ham hock, sauerkraut with pork ribs, shit on a shingle corned beef hash on toast and (admitting…is…so………..HARD) beanee wienees.  There, I said it.  Happy?

When the only girl-child married several years ago, I was convinced she would love to have a cookbook filled with these family classics.  Since I am an obsessive maniac over-achiever, this became a monster project. Like a Dan Brown novel, the seed of my blog’s name lies secretly coded within the pages of this book, Cafe Diem.  I dug it out from under the Vatican archives to share with you.