Why "The Heirloom Bowl?"

"The Heirloom Bowl" represents the memory of my mother and the countless hours she spent in the kitchen, cooking with love for her family.  This is the bowl she used for mixing cornbread and biscuits, two of her best dishes!  It warms my heart to pull it off my shelf and use it for my family.

It's with a sense of pride that I stand in my own kitchen every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas to mix up the corn meal, eggs, oil and buttermilk for the two pans of cornbread required for traditional southerrn cornbread dressing.  Just like she did.

Her cornbread dressing was a melt-in-your-mouth delicacy.  We had it only twice a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas.  It was worth waiting for! It was, to me, better than all the other made-from-scratch dishes she would serve.  It was all good, mind you.  But the dressing with the roasted turkey was my favorite. 

Through the years, I have done my best to replicate her recipe.  You see, she never wrote it down, and unfortunatey Alzheimer's took her away from us before we could get her to put in writing many of the dishes we had grown up on.

But I had watched her, and stood beside her, all those years, so I had a pretty good idea of what went into the dressing recipe.  I found two recipes that were pretty close (one from Martha White and the other from Reynolds Wrap Aluminum Foil) so I tested and adapted them over the last several years to created the dish that has become loved by my own family: I call it  Almost Like Mama's Cornbread Dressing. 

I'm proud to share that recipe with you this week, as I've felt led to start this blog and put into writing my family's favorite recipes. I'll also share our favorites from other good cooks, as well as some semi-homemade shortcut dishes I've created.

As a busy working mom, I'll take any shortcut I can find, as long as it tastes homemade!
It overwhelms me to think about all the cooking my mother did with NO shortcuts.  No pre-cooked bacon. No pre-mixed refrigerator cookie dough. No pre-packaged meals. No fast food places on every corner. No microwave, and so on.

That's why this bowl is so special to me. It represents time, creativity, patience, and love.  And of course, the greatest of these is love.  ~ 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13