About this blog

I started this because a chicken stew almost disappeared.

Family Recipe Roots is a personal food blog. I am not a chef and I don't have a culinary school background. I have a kitchen, a cast iron collection, and a family whose cooking I spent years trying to learn before I understood how fragile that knowledge really was.

A warm kitchen with a pot simmering on the stove and golden afternoon light coming through a window

How this started

My grandmother, her stew, and eighteen batches

My grandmother made a chicken stew that I have never successfully replicated from a written recipe because there was no written recipe. She made it the way she made everything — by feel, by smell, by the sound of the simmer. When she cooked it, the entire house smelled of bay leaves and celery root by noon and dinner at six felt like a reward for the whole day of waiting.

She passed away when I was in my late twenties. I thought I knew her stew well enough to make it. I had eaten it probably a hundred times. I knew the vegetables, the chicken, the broth. What I didn't know was her sequence, her heat, her timing, the way she adjusted salt in three stages rather than all at once. I didn't know the small technical decisions that made it hers rather than just chicken stew.

It took me two years, phone calls to four aunts, and eighteen separate batches to get something close. The eighteenth batch made my mother go very quiet and eat without saying a word, which is the closest thing to an endorsement she ever gives about anything.

That project is what convinced me that this kind of food knowledge is genuinely at risk. Not in a dramatic way (nobody is trying to suppress it) but in the quiet, ordinary way that things disappear when we assume they will always be available and don't bother to write them down.

My food roots

I grew up in a household with food coming from a few different directions at once. My mother's side of the family had been in the American South for generations and cooked accordingly — cast iron everything, vegetables that simmered for hours, desserts built around molasses and pecans and the fruits that came off the trees in the yard. My father's side came from a Cuban family that had landed in Miami in the 1960s, which meant black beans and sofrito and roast pork and the particular flavor of citrus-marinated meat left overnight before it went in the oven.

Learning to cook meant learning both of those traditions and figuring out how they lived alongside each other. I made cornbread in the morning and arroz con pollo at night. I learned that both sides of the family had strong opinions about how to do everything correctly, and those opinions rarely agreed with each other, and the food was better for the argument.

I also spent time in the kitchens of friends' families. A college roommate whose grandmother from Oaxaca made mole from scratch across three days. A neighbor down the street who had grown up in Appalachia and made stack cake for every occasion. A colleague whose Sicilian grandmother's Sunday gravy took the whole morning and was not to be rushed under any circumstances.

All of those experiences taught me that the most interesting food in the world is not in restaurants. It is in the home kitchens of people who learned by watching, not by reading.

What I believe about food and memory

What this blog is not

This is not a professional food blog. The photographs are decent but not styled. The recipes have been tested in a regular home kitchen, not a recipe development studio. Some of the dishes here are simple to the point of being almost too simple to write about — I wrote about them anyway because simple things cooked with attention are often the most worth preserving.

There are no ads per dish, no sponsored post disclosures, no ingredient substitutions because a company wants to promote their product. This is a personal project and I plan to keep it that way.

Say hello

If you have a family recipe you have been trying to recreate, or a story about a dish that disappeared, or a question about the preservation process, I genuinely want to hear it. Write to me at [email protected]. I read and reply to everything.

A family gathering around a table full of dishes, passing food and talking

The blog's approach

Every dish here has a name attached to it.

I don't post a recipe as just a recipe. Every dish has a paragraph or two about its origin — whose kitchen it came from, what occasion it belonged to, what it meant to the people who made and ate it. That context is part of what makes food writing about heritage recipes different from a standard cooking blog.

The Food Stories section goes further, with longer pieces about the process of capturing recipes from family members, building a family cookbook, and understanding what is actually at risk when we don't write things down.

Read the food stories

Start with the recipe collection.

Grandma's classics, weeknight family dinners, baking and sweets, holiday dishes. Every recipe comes with its story and enough detail to actually follow it.

Browse the recipes