CHAPTER 2

Friends

I am surely blessed by good friends in my life. I love cooking for them almost as much as I love cooking with them. Back in grade school, my friend Pam Baker and I would take turns spending the night at each other’s homes. Well, there’s nothing as silly or determined as a couple of grade-school girls. One night when Pam was at my house for a sleepover, we got up the notion to make a pink meringue pie. We pored over a recipe from a new kids’ cookbook I had recently gotten and just had to break in. We assembled all the ingredients. Things were going pretty well until it was time to make the meringue. Mama allowed us to use the electric hand-mixer, a decision she soon regretted. Grade school girls + electric mixer—you probably know where this is going. Things took a bad turn when it quickly became evident that I didn’t yet understand the finer points of running an electric hand-mixer. I raised the beaters out of the bowl of fluffy pink meringue with that thing running full speed. You can imagine the catastrophe that ensued. We had slung pink meringue from floor to ceiling and everywhere in between. Mama was cleaning our disaster out from under her cabinets for weeks. It was amazing the places she found it.

By high school I had perfected the back-of-the-bag chocolate chip cookie recipe and made cookies for my friends for any and all occasions. I had also begun to take more and more interest in cooking.

One semester in college my friend Heather Meeks and I were roomies. We loved to cook. On Valentine’s Day we decided we would make a special breakfast for some fellows. That would have been all fine and dandy, but we got the bright idea to color everything red. I mean everything: the grits, the muffins, and even the eggs. The breakfast would have tasted great if the fellows had been blindfolded. What were we thinking? Those red eggs just took things too far!

I do love my bandmates. We’ve lived through a lot of life together. We’re like family, and when the band first came together, we would meet at my house a lot because I was centrally located between everybody. Karen, Jimi, and Phillip would come over and we would brainstorm ideas like band names or musical direction, and we’d work up songs.

And I would always cook. A good rehearsal cannot happen without some good sustenance! I like to try out new recipes on them. They were actually my willing guinea pigs for some of the recipes in this book.

To this day, as busy as life is, I love to have a birthday goody for each of them and the folks in the band crew on their special day.