A few of my favorite things.

Every once in a while, it's nice to go back to your roots. Over Thanksgiving (while in the town where I grew up), I spent a good amount of time doing exactly that. Who knew, many of my nostalgic stops would be related to food? I made Nick promise that when we went back, we would make time to revisit some of my favorite places.


Visiting Kroger: (For those of you without the distinct privilege of having grown up in the flat middle of America, Kroger is a grocery chain.) I don't know many people who would consider grocery shopping to be "visiting," but perhaps you aren't familiar with how much I love it. Before I was old enough to go to a full day of school, I would sit in the top rack of my mom's grocery cart and "help" her shop. I would help pick green beans one by one, painstakingly open the plastic produce bags (darn static!), hold coupons, and say hello to my Kroger lady, Cheryl, who would give me a smiley sticker to put on the milk jug cap. To me, grocery shopping is a long-standing ritual. Produce soothes me. We averaged one trip per day while in town.


Getting take-out from Avanti's: If you ever meet someone who pronounces it "gon-DO-la" (instead of GON-do-la), chances are, he grew up in my hometown. Avanti's sells hero sandwiches on long baguettes of a fabulous sweet and airy bread, and they're called gon-DO-las. Only after I left home did I realize the rest of the world calls those Venetian boats and ski lifts GON-do-las. Besides sandwiches, Avanti's serves pizzas and pastas, and my favorite dish is their tortellini.

Having a scone at Cyd's: (Cranberry lemon-chip scone, pictured above.) The summer after my senior year of college, the internship I applied for fell through, and I panicked. No summer job? What will I do?? Will my college still want me if I do nothing all summer??? The perfect solution: I cooked and baked for three months. Cyd's started as a small catering business with a storefront shop selling cookies, brownies, soups, deli salads, and cold entrées you could buy and take home (kind of like at Dean and Deluca). Now, the operation has added a huge café area for in-store dining, and their selection and stock have probably quadrupled.

Cyd's is run by a sweet lady who stands maybe five feet tall but is a shrewd businesswoman with the eyes of a hawk. Once while gathering ingredients, I had to go to the walk-in fridge to get butter but forgot eggs. When I went back for the eggs, she looked up from the two or three recipes she had going while simultaneously handling customers up front and said, "Shouldn't you have gotten those eggs when you got the butter?" A lean, mean, efficiency machine, Cyd taught me that 4 T = 1/4 c, 3 t = 1 T, and other cooking and measuring shortcuts...and she wasn't afraid to point out better, faster ways I could work. My mother taught me everything I know about loving food, but I learned a lot from Cyd too (including the best apricot chicken salad recipe ever). Every Saturday, we were allowed to bring home whatever baked goods were still in the store since they would be stale the next week. I always made sure to get a scone (because hers are delicious).

They say that food and culture are inseparable, full of rituals and memories and history. It makes sense, then, that some of the best memories and landmarks from childhood revolve around food, and many of the local chains and mom-and-pop shops are the ones that best embody the values and local color we grew up with. "Fly-over land," "the Middle," "that space between California and New York"...whatever you call the Midwest, it will always be home to me.