Damon Lee Fowler

Once my parents were finally settled into assisted living and we knew for certain they were never going back to their house again, last fall my elder brother and his wife began the daunting task of decluttering it. Thirty years is a long time for two children of The Great Depression to be saving everything and letting it all accumulate in a relatively small house.

The kitchen/breakfast room, after Dad's study, was possibly the biggest challenge. There were six sets of dishes (my obsession with tableware came honestly), a collection of Revereware and Corningware that would supply at least three households, enough saved twist-ties to fill a 10-gallon garbage bag, enough plastic fruit containers to fill twice that many, and stacks of mail, old newspapers, and magazines (my Dad's contribution) to fill at least three lawn-and-leaf bags.

And in all that, not a single decent knife—but I digress.

When asked whether I might want any of the tableware/cookware, my immediate and emphatic answer was "Lord, no!" My own kitchen  Read More 

When Southerners begin to talk of the foods that most comfort us in times of grief, joy, or homesickness, biscuits almost always come into the conversation. So it's no surprise that when the Covid pandemic forced us into lockdown, soft-wheat flour, shortening, and buttermilk disappeared from grocers' shelves and were hard to come by for months.

Luckily, I had just restocked those things, and we're a small household, so I never felt the pinch of the shortage. And I probably made more biscuits during that first month than I'd made in the previous couple of years combined.

Most of them were cream biscuits, a simple formula of flour, baking powder, salt, and heavy cream. They're disgracefully easy, practically foolproof, and I'm lazy. The dough is simply stirred together, folded a few times, then cut and baked.

But they do have one big drawback: Read More