It started with my dad…or maybe with Mama.

My dad taught me to love food.

He worked at a hospital on a 7am - 3:30pm shift, which meant he got home early enough to cook. I got home from school around the same time as he got home from work every weekday, fully happy to avoid both my homework and trombone practice to hang out with him in the kitchen.

We were a small family and had enough, but not a lot. Dinners were classic 70s value meals a lot of times. Hamburger Helper. Spaghetti. Breakfast for dinner. Pot roast in a bag. Gringo tacos. Sloppy Joes. Skinny pork chops (and after that famous Brady Bunch episode, always with applesauce). Cheap, simple, homey classics.

But Dad was raised by a lady (actually his mom’s sister’s daughter, who me and my brothers knew as Mama) who was a classic southern cook. He learned a few things from her. Fried chicken and chops. Black-eyed peas swimming with fatback. Pole beans that she let us strip and snap for her. Country ham with red-eye gravy. Cornbread, or course, made in a cast iron skillet on the stove top. Plenty of Crisco and a cigarette always hanging from her lips as she fretted over dinner. Dad was sneakier with the smoking, but he was fully present at the stove.

Dad was also a creative guy and liked to watch cooking shows. Julia, of course. The Gourmets…both Galloping and Frugal. Justin Wilson. I watched them with him. We’d laugh at Julia’s loopy high notes. Wilson’s crazy, fake-assed Cajun accent. But we watched them cook just like he did with Mama, paying attention to the details, the spices, the techniques, and the influences.

All that good attention to detail and more made it into our house’s kitchen. Coq au vin. Chicken Cordon Bleu and Kiev. Crepes thin enough to read the newspaper through. Chunky ratatouille. Fresh grouper with onions, tomatoes, and garlic, miraculously cooked to perfection in an early model Amana Radar Range Mama bought for our family one Christmas. Teriyaki steak with killer homemade marinade grilled on the coals of a comically small backyard hibachi.

These were the first dishes Dad taught me. He also helped me develop a deep appreciation for sarcasm and truly terrible dad jokes. He reveled in purposely bad imitations of funny foreign accents. He had an appreciation of literature and critical self-expression. Cool vocabulary words. A casual snootiness about food that made us laugh and served us well, pushing us to find ways to honor our taste buds and share our thoughts on “what good tastes like” without wearing out his checkbook. Of course, he shared lots of other stuff that a loving dad shares with his son, too.

My sons (and my wife) will recognize this list of things my dad shared with me in the kitchen as “90% of my entire personality.” Lucky me, lucky them, lucky us.

I hope they will also see that it is a 100% expression of the love that I have for them as my sons as we carry our family’s food-loving story forward.