VAGABOND
KITCHEN

After years of asking everyone how they boil their eggs, I think I’ve finally "cracked" it.

Grandma Mary's soup is both wildly popular and amazingly simple. It's fitting that this technique lives on the blog because Grandma didn't believe in recipes either.

We may never have had much to work with here in Appalachia, but that's fine. We don't need much. We know how to make it work. Sugar, eggs, butter, vinegar standing in for a lemon nobody had access to.

Awesome soup starts with awesome stock, something most people probably aren't doing in their home kitchens these days. The process, though, is both simple and rewarding, the same as most good kitchen habits.

Sloppy Joes don't need reinventing. They need doing right, the kind of right that gets lost when everybody's rushing. Real ground beef, mashed fine, tenderized the same way a diner cook would, and a sauce built layer by layer instead of dumped from a can.