Hey, World! My name is Kelly McGatha. Welcome to my blog! This is my space to talk about all things food.
I’m a veggie lover who could almost be a vegetarian if I didn’t love chicken broth so much. I think about cooking from the time I get up until the time I go to bed.
A little about me and how this blog began:
My childhood was dominated by my Italian American roots. My maternal great grandparents immigrated to Columbus, Ohio in the early 20th century from a small village in Tuscany. When my mother was growing up, she would come home from school to the smell of tomato sauce simmering on the stove and the sight of homemade raviolis drying on her grandmother’s bed. During my own childhood, family dinners were dominated by large pans of lasagna and roast chicken, bowl after bowl of homemade ravioli, crunchy salads and bread to mop up any lingering sauce. And anytime there was a pot of tomato sauce simmering on our stove, my brother and I got to snack on Italian bread covered in sauce and parmesan or pecorino cheese, just like my great grandmother gave my mom when she was a child.
Ever since my twin boys were born, I’ve been thinking a lot about the food I grew up eating – and not just the classic Italian American food. The Middle Eastern dish that taught me to love lentils, the steamed artichokes that taught me how decadent a vegetable can be, the buttery and simple New England seafood – all of these things shaped who I am. The problem is that my cooking has evolved drastically since childhood. These days you’re far more likely to see vegetables and beans on my plate than the meat and cheese heavy meals of my childhood. And yet, as I feed my boys now, I keep thinking about the recipes I grew up with, how my cooking has changed, and which recipes I want to pass down to them. That is how this blog was born.
My blog will be about many things. It will be an exploration of the Italian-American meals that I grew up with and how I cook them now. It will be an ode to the foods I love most – all of the pasta and pecorino, the garlic and chickpeas. And it will be a tribute to the cookbooks and recipes from around the world that inspire me daily and have made me the cook I am today.
And maybe, also, at the end of the day, it will be a journal for my boys, a collection of the foods and flavors that I hope will bring them comfort and help shape the way they view food in America.
About my recipes:
The Italian-American recipes I know and love were passed down to me orally. For these recipes, I may not have exact measurements for each ingredient. Like so many home cooks, I learned to cook with directions such as “a handful of this” and “a spoon full of that.” Sure, cooking this way doesn’t create an exact duplicate – and that’s okay. A minestrone, for example, shouldn’t be cooked the same exact way every time but rather with whatever you happen to have on hand. There is an art and beauty to cooking this way. I will provide exact measurements when I have them, but please see some of my recipes for what they are: methods to be embraced and adapted freely in your own kitchen.
Not every recipe that you see on this blog will be Italian American. In fact, much of my cooking these days is plant-based and fuses flavors from around the world. However, I am putting in a huge effort to try and learn more about the history and ingredients behind recipes that I love. That means that when I share a dish on here that I got from another cook, I will not post the recipe, unless I made significant changes. Instead I will post the link to the recipe or, if it’s from a cookbook, I will share which book it is from. Why? Because I want you to also seek out the recipe and learn about it from the source. I want you to learn about someone else’s culture from them, not me. Plus I’m a lover of cookbooks, and I would much rather you go a local bookstore or library and get someone’s book rather than simply copy it down from my blog.