I think it was those summer mornings, waking up and going out to the garden with my grandfather, that imprinted gardening somewhere deep in me.
I can still smell the sweat, the Old Spice, and the fresh figs from the tree. They'd lived there for 14 years when he passed, and as I got older, I'd occasionally drive by the old house on Elm Street and glance at that tree.
The big pine tree was gone after a few years, but not the fig tree. Fast-forward 20 years, and it's the only house that remains on the dead end, fig tree intact.
Sometimes I can still smell fatback cooking in the cast iron as the hoecakes came off the pan. I recently made potato leek soup with a Southern twist and replaced the bacon with fatback. It brought me a little closer to home.
Growing up, my mom would make the basics but always add a creative spin. Sometimes it was an amazing pairing of unconventional flavors. Other times, it was simply an experiment we learned from.
My grandpa was born in 1930 and my mom in 1969. There was a significant gap in the way they were raised, but the love that went into the food had continuity.
I grew up as the eldest daughter, which meant I knew how to put together a pretty decent BLT at the age of seven.
Back then, I didn't think too much about gardening, cooking, or agriculture in general. I was a small-town country girl trying to escape to the city. I remember a farming class being offered in high school, and I didn't even flinch at the opportunity. At the time, the “opportunity” felt more like a device designed to hold me there, and I was having none of that.
Then I went to college and found myself still watching Barefoot Contessa when I was bored. Eventually, I moved into an apartment on campus that came equipped with a very small stove. I started running my own food experiments, though mine were mostly for survival and variety. There's only so much one can do with a pack of Maruchan and canned tuna.
As I became more independent and my furnished-apartment stoves got bigger, I got ambitious. One Thanksgiving, I volunteered to make the whole dinner. Needless to say, I didn't give my Crock-Pot mac and cheese enough time, and the frozen turkey was larger than my actual oven.
But I took notes.
Fast-forward to 2026: I'm married to a cook and have two toddlers. Most of our days are spent in the kitchen, usually with small children climbing onto chairs and grabbing for whatever we've just told them not to touch. I've also learned an important rule about cooking for toddlers: they're probably not going to eat it.
So I cook for myself, too. I like putting a meal together, trying something new, and seeing what happens. Cooking gives me room to be curious in a way I hadn't expected. Sometimes an unconventional combination works beautifully. Sometimes I've created a sink full of dishes for something none of my children will touch. Either way, I usually learn something.
My husband and I find time together there, too. Food has always been one of our common threads. We literally met in a kitchen at an Irish pub, of all places.
Our kitchen pulls from a little bit of everywhere. We share Southern roots, with Mexican and Sicilian influences folded in. Considering where we met, I suppose an Irish pub belongs somewhere in the mix, too.
Having kids has made me think about my own childhood more often. I catch myself watching what they're eating and how they're experiencing food, then comparing it to what I remember.
A lot of what I ate growing up was home-cooked. As I got older, though, there was plenty of processed food, too. After my grandfather passed, my mom was supporting three kids while also helping care for my grandmother, all while working multiple jobs. Convenience mattered. Easy food made life easier, and it served a purpose.
My husband has always been more skeptical of processed food than I am, so once we had children, we started talking more about what we were feeding our family. I began paying closer attention to ingredient lists, where our food came from, and how much I actually knew about what we were eating.
Then came COVID, recalls, and outbreaks like Cyclospora. Grocery shopping suddenly carried questions I'd never thought much about before. With two young kids in the house, contaminated produce didn't feel particularly theoretical. It sounded like four sick people, a lot of laundry, and two very tired parents.
Eventually I wondered whether growing some of our food myself could give me a little more control over the process.
Growing food was part of my grandfather's way of life on the farm. As a teenager, I'd looked at that same world and seen something that might keep me stuck in the place I was trying so hard to leave.
Years later, I found myself looking at it differently.
Maybe it was a way to move forward.
I did some research and realized I could start small. I didn't need an acre of land or some grand homesteading operation. I was already buying food from the grocery store. I could start there.
My first opportunity came during a particularly aggressive celery phase in our house. I was juicing it. My kids were eating ants on a log. One day, I looked at the bottom of a bunch and thought, Hey, that has roots on it. Let's see if it'll keep growing.
It did.
As it turns out, that was my first actual Plot & Plate experiment.
From there, we took a Roma tomato and grew 11 tomato plants from seed. People at garden centers and plant shops, along with a few of my neighbors, kept telling me that starting tomatoes that way wasn't particularly easy. Every little pat on the back made me think, Okay. Maybe I can actually do this.
Two celery bottoms became 11 Roma tomato plants. Then came five bell pepper plants, arugula, lettuce, mustard greens, green onions, garlic, and basil.
Suddenly, everything growing in coffee mugs on my windowsill needed somewhere to live.
That's when I learned that soil is expensive.
I also learned that tomatoes are determinate or indeterminate. I had no idea what either word meant. I wondered why produce from the grocery store could be so difficult to grow when, presumably, it had been grown on a farm in the first place. Every answer seemed to uncover another thing I didn't know.
The shaky job market added another layer. Writing and marketing haven't exactly felt like bastions of stability lately. If I could save a dollar here and there by growing something we were already buying, I figured it was worth trying.
Then I started thinking beyond the individual vegetables. Could I make a full meal from what I grew on my patio? Would I be able to grow enough? How much could a family realistically produce in a small space? Why had buying nearly everything we eat become so much easier than growing even a small portion of it ourselves?
The questions started getting bigger.
I wanted to know about the meals those vegetables would eventually become. The food I grew up eating. The food my husband grew up eating. The traditions that somehow ended up sharing the same kitchen. The things we do because somebody before us did them that way.
I wanted to know the stories behind all of it.
How did we end up growing and eating the way we do? What do history, money, culture, labor, and tradition have to do with what eventually lands on our plates?
And every so often, the simplest question is still the most interesting one:
Why are we like this?
So, here we are. Plot & Plate.
There will be gardening here, of course. There will be recipes and experiments, too. I want to dig into histories, test assumptions, learn from people who know far more than I do, and leave room for questions I haven't thought to ask yet.
Even if you're not particularly interested in gardening, I think one of the most human things we do is gather. We grow food. We cook it. We change it. We pass it down. Eventually, we find ourselves around a table eating it together.
Maybe you're here because you grow tomatoes. Maybe you're here because you just like eating them. Maybe you've never thought much about where they came from at all.
For a long time, neither did I.
It took me years to realize that what stayed with me from those mornings with my grandfather was bigger than the garden itself. I can remember the figs, the cast iron, and plenty of meals. What I remember most is what it felt like to be there.
Maybe that's what stayed with me.
If you're curious too, pull up a chair.