Family Tree Food & Stories

Today I'm talking with Nancy and Sylvia at Family Tree Food & Stories. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:01

Today I'm talking with Nancy May and Sylvia Lovely. What a wonderful last name. Thank you. Family Tree Food and Stories.  Sylvia is in Kentucky. Kentucky, you got it. Nancy is in Florida. There you go. So good morning ladies. How are you?  Good morning to you and so good to be with you. I love your voice.  Thank Doing good. Yeah. Thank you.

00:28

I always feel weird when people say that because I don't hear it the way other people hear it, but that is totally fine. And what a lovely compliment. Thank you. Sure.  All right. So what's the weather like in Florida, Nancy?  It is warm and a little sticky. It's August,  but that said, we have  lovely air conditioning inside. So the weather inside is beautiful.  It's sunny outside.  And what's the weather like in Kentucky, Sylvia?

00:54

I might say a big ditto. It's about 95. It's very hot. The weather's supposed to break. I wish I was in Minnesota where my son lives in Duluth. It'd be a little cooler. He says it's cooler up there. But it's coming our way. So that's good news. Yes. Fall is definitely coming. I heard geese honking the other day and our trees are just starting. The maples are just starting to change. Wow. That's early.

01:20

And it's been cooler at night. mean, the last couple of nights it's been warm because we've had rain and thunderstorms, but  it's coming. And I'm not sad to see the summer go. It has been so hot and so muggy here.  That's what Ross says too, up in Duluth.  But you're around the Minneapolis St. Paul area. Is that where you are? I am an hour southwest of Minneapolis.  Okay. All right.

01:44

Yep. I am where the Jolly Green Giant started out. yeah, that's right. how cool. That's right.  We did some work on that, didn't we, Nancy? It's been several episodes ago. And frozen foods for sure. Yeah, exactly. ho ho,  Green Giant.  Well, you just gave me a perfect opening. Tell me about yourselves and what you guys do. All right, Nancy, you want to go first?  Sure. So  I'm Nancy May  and  I'm the co-host of

02:13

Family Tree Food and Stories podcast. And we are also the co-author of a book called My Family Tree Food and Stories, which is a book that shows you how to take all your family recipes or the recipes that you love, whether it's family or not, and write the stories related to the recipes. Some are good, some are like, yeah, you know, those flops actually make good stories and good fodder for future conversations too.  And there's always a way to fix a recipe and a meal. But let  me see.

02:42

I am not the best cook in the world, but I keep trying  and  that's half the fun. But food is an outlet to be creative and  bring family and friends together at the table. In fact, we just had a nice  gathering of some friends at our home the other night and somebody said,  oh, well, I don't cook at home for friends. Why not? Because I much rather do that than meet somebody at a restaurant because that way you actually know who they are as people in your home and whether you want to invite them back or not.

03:11

So that's kind of our,  we like them or do we not like them?  And let me piggyback onto that.  I'll tell how we came together, Nancy. That could be an interesting thing. How did Florida marry Kentucky?  We came together because of a local podcaster here.

03:31

in Lexington, Kentucky, which is where I am based. And he introduced us in the rest of his history. We just started clicking together. I mean, I guess that's kind of the best word for it. We compliment each other beautifully. I don't cook. I so admire, I own a restaurant, Azura Restaurant and Patio here in Lexington. It's high-end restaurant, lots of seafood, steak, and that kind of thing serves the local racetrack. And that's where

03:59

My husband and I love the community of the restaurant.  That's why we got into it. The stories that come in a restaurant and come together  are just amazing. So I've enjoyed my journey with Nancy.  We are coming up on a year, I guess, of our podcast. And our book has been out there for a little more than a year. So yeah, real exciting. I love it. Congratulations on almost a year. And what's the book? What's the name of the book? It's called My Family, Tree Food and Stories.

04:26

And it's on Amazon and it's a  journal slash memory book really of being able to look at your family history in your trees.  And really how do you pair those stories around  meals that you had with grandma or grandpa or mom or dad or your sister or brother or even just friends who have become part of your family.  And you put your history together in  the book from appetizers on through to desserts and

04:55

even the scoops along the way.  I actually teach storytelling for the Carnegie Center. I'm kind of a weird person. I'm a lawyer by profession.  am a storyteller teacher  and I own a restaurant. you know, I'm the master of miscellany, I guess. But anyway,  the stories  and  we actually feature several tiny stories in the book because we want to show people and give them  instructions on how to put a story together.

05:24

Because some people are just so like,  I can't do that. I don't know. And yet, you know they know. You know that they know how to have a conversation. All we have to do, Nancy and I have to do with a guest is just mention food  and they'll take off on a story. Most people think writing a story is some unique thing that not any mere mortal can do. And yet we want to show them that they can. So we did that in several small vignette stories in the book.  Nice. That is awesome.

05:54

Nancy mentioned the litmus test for having people over to see if you want to have them over again.  The litmus test in my house growing up is we had a cat  and I think his name, oh, it's escaping me. We had two cats in a row that were almost the same color. The first one was Casper, but I can't remember the second. Jeff, Jeffy was the second one. J-E-F-F-Y.  And  Jeffy, if he didn't like somebody who came in the house, would

06:24

would howl at them, kiss at them,  and run back to my parents' bedroom and not come back. And it was typically someone that he had not met before that we didn't know very well.  I kid you not, those people he reacted that way to did not come back to our house.  It might be a handy cat to keep around.  Yeah, he died quite a while ago. He was old. Yeah, he actually died sleeping.

06:52

Yeah, he died sleeping in front of my parents wood stove in the mall.  Oh, I think he was like 15 years old.  Wow. Cats go a long time. I've got a 14 year old that's going strong.  yeah, they're, they're good. barn cat by the name of Wonder Woman.  Uh  huh. My dad actually called just Puss Puss like dad. She's got a name. Nope, Puss Puss. And that cat would ride along in his shoulders outside.

07:18

Sweet. Yeah, cats live outside. lovers.  Mary, we're animal lovers, you can tell.  We are too. And I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole on cat names.  But  the  two barn cats we have right now, the males,  one is named Satan because he is pure black and  he was pure spite.  And then the second one we have, his name is Fluffy, but he will be a year old in September.  is like a...

07:46

He's a golden beige and he was very long haired. And then he blew his coat this spring and he almost naked.  yeah, of course he's fluffy, still fluffy,  but is now ironic. We did an episode on Don  Food  a few episodes ago. then Nancy and I, as horrible coincidence would happen, we both lost our dogs about the same time, Nancy. Oh, I mean, it was horrible. We were both like.

08:15

lost at sea.  It was awful. But we've since gotten new dogs.  Nice. Yeah. Replacements just in addition. Just in additions. Yes, absolutely. You can't replace a dog. can only add a new one.  We have a dog here. She'll be five.  Well, she's turned five on August 3rd. I keep thinking it's July. It's August.  And  she's five. And  I can't believe she's five.

08:42

I keep thinking she's a puppy and she's not. She's a fully fledged adult dog now.  I know it. You just get so attached to them. Can I ask what kind? I'm sorry. I don't want to take us down that hole either. No, it's okay. She is a, well, she was told she was sold to us as a mini Australian shepherd, but I have spoken to people who raise Australian shepherds on my podcast.  They're like, there's no such thing. She's just a small Australian shepherd. She weighs about 36 pounds.  Perfect size.

09:11

Yeah, perfect. And she's not crazy. She's very, very go, go, go outside, but when she comes in, she just is calm. She's fine. She just wants peace.  we picked the right dog. We got her when she was a day shy of eight weeks old.  Oh, perfect.  She was  basically, if I put my two hands together flat, know, pinkies together, she was that big in my palms.  Oh, sweet, sweet. I she was five pounds.

09:41

And I'll miss that puppy. I don't miss the craziness that comes with puppies, but oh. No, I'm. We're puppies. Both Nancy and I are in the throes of that.  Yeah. Bibi of Brooksville, where we're deciding, is she really a Bibi or is she like dirt ball?  Three months. Yeah. Four months. She'll be four months in the,  on Wednesday. Oh, you  are.

10:09

Yeah, I made it. I'm eight months with Ellie who's a Bernie doodle, but you know, I like the doodles because they don't shed  You guys are brave women because I don't want another puppy when Maggie goes I want to get I want to adopt a dog because I don't want to go through the velociraptor stage where they chew on it Oh, absolutely, and they all have their own diet mine loves paper. She chews up paper

10:36

So far no shoes, but I just said that and that means she'll get shoes on it next but they have interesting diets when they're puppies  Yes, they do and they will destroy anything within their reach even something that might kill them. So that's I don't want puppy. the older dog right now. Yeah  Yeah, I don't want a puppy again. It was really fun. I'm glad I had the experience but I'm I'm good on puppies Okay, so we went way down the rabbit hole on animals. That's okay. I love animals, too

11:06

But  you were also saying about family traditions and memories that food brings back. And I've  shared a couple of times on the podcast about certain things that I really think of when I think of cooking with my grandma. And she used to make these amazing mincemeat pies with real venison, like from the deer that my grandpa or my dad shot. And  when she got done, she would always have extra pie dough left.

11:33

and she made really nice preserves. And so she would let my sister and I work with her after she got the pies put together and she'd roll out the dough and she'd give us a hunk, you know, a ball. she'd say, she'd say, put your thumb right in the middle of it on the pan and press down. Uh One of my favorites. she put like extra sugar in her dough. I don't know why, but her pie crust was always sweet. Oh, yummy.

12:01

And so it was this very sweet pie crust and she'd have like blackberry preserves or strawberry or whatever. And she had these special little spoons. I don't know why they were small. I don't know what they were, but they were special. And she would let us use those to scoop the preserves into the pie dough thumbprint. And then they'd bake in the oven for however long, come out and cool down. Cause you do not want to those things right out of the oven. can burn your tongue for a month.

12:28

Yeah. Sugar and butter seem to go with grandmothers and cooking. Oh yeah, absolutely. Do you still have those spoons? No, I do not. I don't know who has those spoons. Don't you regret some of the things that like that iron skill that my dad would make cornbread in? Yeah. I wish I'd saved it. Never even thought about saving it. know, George Bernard Shaw was right. Youth is wasted on the young.

12:52

Yeah, You don't know that you want to save things and then by the time you realize you'd like to have them, they're already gone. I'm a saver. I'm a pack rat. And that's the hard part. When  we moved from Connecticut down to Florida, we had to get rid of so much stuff because they were going to charge us by the pound to move everything. So I told Bob and his brother that they had to get a U-Haul and all the good stuff that I wanted was going in the U-Haul.

13:21

And all the stuff that maybe somebody else could break would be, you know, elsewhere. But still, like his anvil that he wants to, cause he does blacksmithing. Nope. We're not paying by the pound for that thing. But the other day as we were, I was sort of prepping and thinking about what to make for these guests. I ran across all the napkin rings.

13:42

that had been passed down through the generations of our family  that we used as kids. And there was one that was always my sister's, there was one that was mine, there was one that was mom's, there was one that was dad's. We had extras for over the generations. But I said, oh my God,  we haven't used napkin rings forever. We have to start using them and cloth napkins always. I'm still like a stick, paper napkins, no, not good.

14:07

But those napkin rings always told you where to sit and whose place it was. And you always felt odd sitting someplace else. Yeah. Yeah.  You know, going back to grandmothers and  memories, I remember  the first thing, West Liberty, Kentucky is where my family was  in tiny place in the middle of nowhere. And we'd get there from Ohio. We were so excited. And the first place we'd go was the cellar where for some reason my grandmother had put up, as they put it in the country, had put up grape juice.

14:37

in jars, had just stacks of jars of grape juice. And I understood later that they grew grapes kind of wild in the hills of Eastern Kentucky. It interesting to me that it would have happened that way, but it was so good. You know, you're just immediately headed for the cellar. I remember in college in Virginia, in the springtime, they had the wild grapes that were growing on the side of the road. And if you drove by with the windows rolled down,

15:07

you could smell those grapes. It was just amazing. I  in the fall, not the springtime,  in the fall when the grapes, but they were so rich.  So there is a thing. There is a thing then. See, that's what they told me about in the hills that that's how they found the grapes.  yeah, yeah, really good. Yeah, it smells like Walters grape juice.  Oh, sweet. My other memory is,  is the book, the story I have in the book, each Nancy and I each contributed our own story.

15:35

to the book again as an illustration, but my grandmother was a teetotaler from Eastern Kentucky.  And at Christmas time, made a, we pulled a big trick on her. made a rum cake, didn't tell her what it was  and enticed her to take a big slice and she ate every bit of it and said how much she loved it.  And we were doubled over in another room laughing our  rear end off.  Yeah. Cake caper.  Cake caper. Yes.

16:04

My grandmother was not a teetotaler. My grandmother made the rhubarb wine that we had for a while  and was always brought out for special occasions, births, wedding announcements, whatever. And the last bit of rhubarb wine, my dad, yep, my dad, it was a giant cardboard. My dad brought it out of this cellar and it was my dad, my mom, my uncle Ken, which was my mom's brother, Bob and I.

16:32

We sort of  announced, you know, we were getting married and my uncle Ken had said, look, do you two kids want to get married? He offered to give us his wife's ring. She had passed a number of years earlier and Bob and I had just been out shopping and he pulls out of his pocket under the table and says to my uncle Ken, it look like this?  And he's like, oh my God.  And my dad's like, what's going on? Well, out came the rhubarb wine and we drank the last.

16:59

batch of rhubarb wine. Oh, that's South Central. Wow.  Hey, while we're on the subject of drinking, can I tell my drinking story? Sure.  Okay.  I was in Duluth visiting with my son  and he insisted on going to the local bar in Duluth, Minnesota to watch the wild play. Now as a Minnesotan, you know what the wild is? Uh huh. That's the hockey team.

17:25

And so I was like,  oh honey, it's like 10 o'clock at night. The thing starts and I'm, you know, I go to sleep.  No, mom, please go. So we went, I had my one glass of wine. It's all I ever drink is one glass of wine.  And I fell asleep. And suddenly I feel my son, mom, mom, wake up. They're kicking us out because they say you're drunk.

17:47

Oh no. mom got drunk in Duluth, Minnesota. It's a great story for my friends. They love it because I'm about as boring as you get, 70 something that I am. I drink the same glass for you. Oh my goodness. Anyway, I was starting out at a bar in Duluth, Minnesota. I'm kind of proud of that. kind neat. I would wear that as badge of honor.

18:13

The other story that I've told on the podcast is that my other grandma who lived in Illinois used to make Christmas candies from scratch.  we always called them Christmas candies because she made them at Christmas time and would send us a box in Maine where I grew up.  And she would make divinity, she would make potato stick candy,  she would make buckeye candy,  peanut Potato stick candy? I haven't heard of that.

18:42

It's, you know, the butterscotch chips that you can get that are like chocolate chips? Yeah. It's that and potato sticks and peanuts and I don't know. Just a mixture. Yeah. It's of like a Chex Mix kind of thing. Yeah, Chex Mix. But the butterscotch chips are melted so it's all over so it's a melted thing. that sounds good. Yeah. I'm coming to your house. That's where grandma's house. So she used to make those and oh my goodness, what else?

19:12

I can't remember. Oh, the coconut nougat chocolate covered bonbon candies. yeah, sure. Yeah, my mother loved those. She would make these from scratch and she would send like a 30 pound box of this to us in end of November, 1st of December for Christmas. Wow. Oh, that sounds good. I look for Nancy to try to make that potato stick thing.

19:37

Yes, it's super easy. I had  a recipe, I would get it to you, but I don't have it. bet my mom has it. I will see if I can get it from her.  anyway, like,  God, I don't even remember what year it was. My grandma was staying with my parents because she had  what they called dementia, but I think it was probably Alzheimer's. I don't know if dementia and Alzheimer's are different things. But anyway, she was staying with them and my parents were in their  50s, I think, and she was in her

20:06

70s, I  think.  I can't remember. But I got a bee in my bonnet that I wanted to make some of the candy and send it to my folks while grandma was still around to try it. Yeah. And I'm going to cry because it was a big deal.  I made, I didn't make divinity because  divinity is a pain in the butt to make. Yeah.  And it's very temperature sensitive and it's very hot sugar. And I was just like, I don't want to burn myself doing this,  but I made

20:35

Peanut brittle, made potato stick candy, I made the buckeyes  and  the coconut bonbon thingies.  probably a couple other things. Fudge, mean chocolate fudge was a recipe I found. And I sent my parents a 40 pound piece of candy.  Oh, that's so neat. And they got it.  And my mom called and she's like,  we can't.

21:02

Possibly eat all this candy. said I know give it to the neighbors give it to the people at Dad Works with  Share it and So I said did grandma try it and she said yes She tried one of the Buckeyes and I saw  and she said she didn't say anything but the look on her face was joy Was this joy?  Was she able to help you at that point to tell you know I was in Minnesota and they were in Maine so I see I see

21:29

Because I have a similar story when my mother in her final illness I had forgotten that I had not learned from her how to make her prize-winning fried chicken Yeah, and I'm like, oh my gosh, it was November 19th. I remember it well It was her birthday. She died a month later and I went in and she was asleep on the bed I said mamma which was her preferred pronoun at that point. I said because of her she has two grandchildren that my boys

21:56

Can you come help me make fried chicken so I can learn how? Oh, she get up, she goes into the kitchen, she puts it on the first stage. And I looked up and I looked in the kitchen and she wasn't there.  And I went back to her bedroom and she had gone back to bed. She had totally forgotten  what she was doing.  And so I never learned to make fried chicken. And that's a big regret because she had such a knack.

22:18

with fried chicken. You don't cook anyway, so you've got a restaurant. Maybe that's what happened. At that day I said, no more.  I'm going to own a restaurant instead. don't know what it is with grandma's and fried chicken. The same grandma that made the Christmas candy,  she used to make fried chicken, but she would  use maple syrup in her batter.  So it was a maple syrup fried chicken. And  oh my God, we would go out and visit her.

22:47

and she would have it cooking because we'd in about the time it was dinner time.  And we'd walk in the house  and all you could smell was this maple syrup smell and  chicken  skin smell.  oh my God, every time I smell something like that now I'm like, wow, that's grandma's kitchen. Yeah, brings it back. See, my grandmother was  too ill when I was a kid. She passed away when I think it was probably just the end second grade.

23:15

But so I remember my grandmother in a wheelchair, yet taking her out to restaurants, my dad bringing the wheelchair up the stairs. This was before like ADA stuff and just the experience of remembering. can picture it like it was yesterday. Her sitting there and worried about the guys, you know, bringing her up the stairs, whether she was too heavy or not. Well, you know, didn't matter, right? know, they were, they were big guys. And, um,

23:41

Christmas time and I think was predominantly Christmas time and then my dad's birthday. She would send cases of tomato aspect and vichyssoise to my dad because he loved it. Wow. I remember the Campbell's, one was I think Campbell's and the other was sort of some other kind of brand. But to this day, I don't think I could eat any of that stuff, but he loved it. The cans of those stuff.

24:06

coming, dad in underwear. Underwear, good.  And just seeing her smiling at the end  of the dining room table when she was at our house for dinner. those are the stories that I remember my grandmother as far as  food related stuff. Yeah.  And these are the kind of stories that need to go in the book that people buy from you guys.  Yes. That's what we want.  We think this actually is a movement across the country. And you're kind of part of that too.

24:36

You know, looking at kind of, you know, they say we live in the age of loneliness, epidemic  loneliness.  And we think, and there's so many movements out there moving in this direction  of cooking. I'm reading the biography of Jacques Pepin right now, because it's his 90th birthday, right, in December.  And it's fascinating story, Nancy. I told you I had gotten the book and was reading it on vacation.  And  he later in life, after his accident, near fatal accident,

25:05

uh, actually founded a foundation that works with incarcerated people to teach them to cook because there's something about putting that food together and sitting around the table and conjuring up the stories. There's, again, people don't think they have those stories, but you scratch the surface and they'll start telling you stories about that time I was in an RBNB and Airbnb and the pan fell apart with a lasagna and we didn't know the pan was substandard. know, I mean, there's just.

25:33

all those things that we wish people would like capture  and to enjoy food. Not necessarily even if you're not a cook. You know, we had a person on a young woman, Meredith, on our show  in an early episode that had, this is a typical story too of 40 year old in today's world. She got married, mother put together the recipe book and her handwriting gave it to her as a wedding gift. That was Meredith's dream. She got it. She said, as she put it in our show, she said the,

26:03

The cookbook still exists or the recipe book still exists. The marriage ended in a year.  So she's now a divorced 40 year old  and  was, bought the book and was filling it out with her own recipes. Then she called me the other day and said, okay, it's 2.0 now.  She said, I'm having my mother write those recipes in my book, in the Family Tree Food and Stories book. And then I'll tell, I told her I would fill in the stories on the other side.  So it's like this partnership.

26:31

between this 40 year old single, she has no children, single,  and  not in a typical situation in today's world.  And she's got the book and she's cherishing the book. She's catching on  and  knows she wants, again, her mother's partnership on this. It's really beautiful. It is beautiful. That's,  oh, my heart.  You know, Mary, stories don't need to be food related stories, don't need to be always shared with family. A number of back, a group of

27:01

women that I knew, business women, we all decided to rent an Airbnb together and do sort of a business mastermind. And at dinner, what we ended up doing was everybody was charged with making a meal at some point  in the course of our stay together  of  their family or something that was  important to them.  And  one  of them came from a Lebanese background and she talked about how you made the meat, this particular rose water and went on.

27:31

So we were able to actually learn more about one another through sharing of the food and the relationships that we had with our families, again, with one another. And we learned so much about the history and the background of each other in such a personal way. And yeah, a bottle of wine here or there doesn't help her either still. And so we were all in the same house. We were working together, but it was really fun to, to, you know, be charged with what's my job if I'm going to make Lebanese food. I don't know.

28:00

So we learned a lot about each other  that weekend. I love potlucks.  love it when people get together and bring something to share. Yeah, that is,  that's what we're doing that this Saturday with our  staff of the restaurant.  Just let everybody bring something and not, you know, we'll buy  the main course and  let everybody come and kind of off the clock, have that opportunity to just have a great time.

28:30

one of our customers is going to donate his house and pool. Yay. That helps, right?  But,  you know, and the whole history of food is so interesting to us because we want to be tied always to tradition. But our traditions date back as we find out, you know, Ireland is full  of  traditions and mystical kinds of things.  The  story of salmon and all the  kind of

28:57

lead into all the foods that we taste today.  And I find myself, Nancy, I don't think I'd shared this with you, but I was always kind of interjecting, maybe I was being obnoxious,  something that we had learned in the course of our work  on the podcast.  You know, like maybe it was a meal at a restaurant that  was a Michelin one star  restaurant.  And we did that in La Jolla.  And I  was able to explain that because we did an episode on it. you  know, it's just

29:26

It's interesting because it is, it does fill in some blanks on our traditions and how they've evolved over the years. And people, think, would find that to be interesting and  how new traditions are evolving. Yes. And it can't be a tradition if you don't start it somewhere.  Maybe you can start tomorrow. It doesn't need to start today. It can be just something you came and said, I want to do this. You know, my husband and I have this now a tradition where

29:54

we started, I think it was probably about 20 years ago, we figured we'd do a Christmas party. We'd never done a Christmas party in our house before. And we said we wanted to do a gift to friends where they didn't have to cook. So we did the party, an open house. It was the Friday before Christmas Eve. So whatever Christmas Eve fell on, I said, our gift to you is that you don't have to cook. Come to our house, it's a meal, we're opening our house. And that's what we did. We did this huge spread.

30:23

And so people would say, are we invited next year?  They left that year before.  like, you know, kind of like the other couple, I mean, we liked everybody who came last weekend, but there were some people who were like not invited back  for good reasons. not in our house, right? Jeffy would have sniffed them out. Oh, Jeffy, right. Well, my stepson and his wife  called my husband, the other, well,

30:53

last year  in September and said, Hey, we're thinking about coming up for Thanksgiving. And they're in Nebraska.  And I was like, okay.  My husband  relays the information to me and I'm like, okay, so what am I cooking?  And my husband says, that's the beautiful part. What, do you want to cook for dessert? Because that's all you need to do. They're going to cook. Oh, That's great.  So.

31:22

Um, my, my husband and his son, who basically is my son. just didn't carry him. He's the child of my heart, not my body.  did, they, uh, did the whole turkey in the, the thingy outside with the oil.  Oh, like the fried turkey. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yes. They did that.  And,  um, has my, my son's wife brought, she cooks stuff ahead, which is smart. You can do that.

31:51

She brought some fabulous garlic butter mashed potatoes from scratch. Yummers.  And stuffing and  I  think it was green bean casserole that didn't really survive. kind of, it kind of didn't handle the weather on the drive up.  So it got mushy, but it was good.  And  she does not get to cook like this very often because she has a big family and everybody else cooks.  Oh, so she cherished it. Yeah. And she loves to cook and she doesn't get to.

32:20

And I understand that because I went through the same thing when I was her age. So it was this wonderful thing that they did for us. And I made squash pie and I think I did an apple pie. remember. Oh, you'll have to try the Z-apple. Is that what you call Right. I made what's called a Zapple pie this weekend, which was on one of our shows. it basically, instead of apples, you use zucchini. I didn't really follow the recipe 100%.

32:50

That's okay. I didn't even look at, oh, you got to peel it. My husband's like, you're supposed to peel the zucchini. So people don't know it's zucchini. He's like, well, it's just green apples, but it tastes pretty much like apples, believe it or not. like we just recorded an episode with one of our guests said, man, you've got balls to serve this to people. But it was good. I told Nancy that was among her many talents, balls.

33:19

Last Thanksgiving, I made a plan. I went to Duluth to join my son. He's a cook and he does such a great job and he has eight kids and six of them were there. And we cooked and we had the best time over the turkey. And then he's one of these people, he cooks his own broth and, uh, you know, all of it. I mean, he's just like a back to earth or kind of thing when it comes to cooking, but we did this magnificent dinner.

33:47

and we slaved all morning and we put it on the table. He has five kids under the age of eight at the time and  not one of them would touch it.  We could have killed them. But anyway,  we enjoyed eating it and he froze a bunch of it, which he's very good at. So anyway, sometimes there are mishaps too. yeah, absolutely. But  the reason I wanted to share the story about my daughter-in-law doing most of the cooking for Thanksgiving is that  when  you're the mom,

34:16

You guys know,  you think that you're the one who's going to have to do all the cooking forever. And you got to make room for the other people behind you to do their thing too.  That's what Ross and Ross is a very good cook. So I'm very proud of him. don't know where he picked it up.  Too much micromanagement in the kitchen doesn't make everybody feel like they're welcome.

34:42

Even when we have guests, people say, can I help with anything? I'm like,  mm, yes, you can. Here, unpack this one. Cut this, cut that. Right. So I love, I love volunteer sous chefs. Yeah. Right.  Volunteer sous chefs. love that.  I'm never on time with everything. So it's, it's okay.  We're looking for a sous chef. So if either of you are interested.

35:03

No, yeah, everybody be waiting for a meal for a long time waiting for music. Two hours later, you have an extra that you'd be making all the money on the wine and the  liquor at your restaurant with  me. They say people are drinking less, you know, and we've seen the ordering of mocktails just explode.  That's  fine. And people want the mocktails now.  And the beer.

35:29

And even a wine, I told them that if they served me that wine, just don't tell me it's not alcoholic. Cause I'll just like not like it from the get go, but I wouldn't mind trying it. It's more of a sparkling wine that doesn't have alcohol in it.  we the no alcoholic beer or low alcohol beer. We've got one that's like 29 calories.  so Bob ordered, offered it to one of our guests and she said, that's beer flavored seltzer.

35:57

Well, see, that's kind of the way I would be. I don't want to know if because I don't drink a lot but when I do, I want the real thing.  I  don't drink because the last time I drank, I thought I was being smart and I drank water in between each drink because I am prone to migraines and I really didn't want migraine the next day. guess what?

36:23

freaking hangover of my life. haven't really had any drink in 10, 15 years now.  Oh, really?  have a solution for some of that. If you ever decide to go back. had friends over the years who, as they were going through the early stages of menopause, they said, yep, it was the sulfates that they found out that was causing the migraines. So  they discovered that you could drink champagne, which doesn't have the sulfates.

36:51

So that's how they got around it and they didn't get the migraines.  if you decide to... I love champagne. I can't afford it. Oh,  go to Sam's Club or Costco. can  afford  it. Maybe you're better off just doing a mocktail. But the thing about mocktails is they contain a lot of sugar. I'm trying to stay away from that. So I just drink water with lemon in it or something like that on the days.  is hard when you own a restaurant not to drink.

37:18

and not to drink the wine.  could come up with an excuse every day. Oh, I've had a terrible day. I need a glass of wine.  Oh, I've had a wonderful day. I need a glass of wine. It doesn't solve the problems or it doesn't make the day better.  But it tastes pretty  good. It does.  Anyway, that's the thing you grapple with now is,  you know, what's too much of something and what's,  whatever. Uh-huh.  Absolutely. All right, ladies, I try to keep this to half an hour. We're at 37 minutes. So I am going to cut you loose. Where can people find you?

37:49

They can find us at podcast.familytreefoodandstories.  uh, or just podcast.familytreefoodandstories. And if you look for my family tree, food and stories in Amazon, we're there as well.  And you're on Facebook and Instagram. Is that right? are on Facebook and Instagram. found us on Instagram. Absolutely. Yes. All right.  Awesome. Great. Thank you.  As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.

38:15

I hope you lovely ladies have a great rest of your week. And remember, every meal has a story and every story is a feast. Yay. All right. Thanks.