VAGABOND
KITCHEN

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.

The first time I walked into Beans N' Bagels on the Montrose stop of the Brown Line in Chicago, I was just looking for a good coffee. I found a lot more.

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.

I started cooking professionally while I was in college at West Liberty University, back before it was even a university, around the end of 1999.

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.