The Southern Yankee Kitchen

I don’t remember where or when I tasted my first raw oyster, but I DO remember that it was a game changer. Plump and juicy, redolent of the sea, a tender resistance in the chew…..it was love at first bite, if not sight. Being raised in a good Catholic family, we did the fish-on-Friday thing. Typically it was either frozen fish sticks, a tuna noodle casserole or smelts, small sardine-sized fish, intact but for their heads, coated in bread crumbs and baked on a cookie sheet in

Few vegetables bring me back to my Yankee roots like the butternut squash. I would not dream of a Thanksgiving table without it and growing up, it was a frequent supper side dish during the fall and winter months. It was the gourd of choice and so common to the New England dinner table, that it was known simply as “squash”. THE squash. As if there were no others. Shortly after my family moved from the city to the suburbs, we started a small vegetable garden. As an 11-year-old