Tag: food and memory

  • A Long Way from Canned Tamales

    A Long Way from Canned Tamales

    Whenever I travel outside the Southwest, someone eventually asks.

    “Do you want to go out for Mexican food?”

    They mean it kindly.

    They are trying to offer me something familiar. Something they believe might remind me of home.

    And my answer is almost always no.

    Not because I dislike Mexican food.

    Because I have learned to love it too much.

    I am spoiled now.

    There are things you can unlearn. Facts you can forget. Names that slip loose from memory. Roads that disappear after enough years away.

    But once you have eaten certain foods prepared in certain places, your mouth becomes an unreliable diplomat.

    It no longer wishes to be polite.

    Before I moved west, Mexican food mostly meant Taco Bell.

    This is not an insult to Taco Bell. Taco Bell has been there for many of us at times when few others were willing to answer the call. It has fed college students, night-shift workers, road-weary travelers, and people who suddenly discovered at 11:43 p.m. that they had made no plans for dinner.

    There is nothing wrong with that.

    But a considerable distance separates a drive-through taco from somebody’s grandmother standing over a pot that has been simmering since morning.

    Before the Southwest, I did not understand that distance.

    My earliest knowledge of tamales came from a can.

    Hormel tamales.

    Wrapped in paper.

    Yes, paper.

    Whenever I tell people this, I have to stop and explain because they look at me as if I have confessed that my family ate soup with a fork.

    But they existed.

    You opened the can, slid out a stack of soft cylinders covered in sauce, and peeled the paper from each one. There was no corn husk. No assembly line of aunties around a kitchen table. No family recipe guarded more carefully than a Social Security number.

    Just a can.

    And paper.

    I ate them without complaint because children rarely question the borders of the world they inherit. If the can said tamales, then tamales were what they were.

    We believe many things simply because no one has yet taken us somewhere better.

    Arizona was my first real experience with Mexican food—not the idea of it, not the national chain interpretation, but food connected to people, place, heat, memory, and migration.

    The flavors were brighter than I expected. The chiles carried more than pain. The tortillas were not merely edible plates designed to keep your hands clean. They had texture. Warmth. A life before they reached the table.

    I began to understand that salsa was not just a thing in a jar.

    This felt important.

    Some salsa announced itself with tomatoes and freshness. Some arrived dark and smoky. Some offered a gentle handshake before setting fire to the furniture.

    You learned to respect them all.

    Then there was Texas.

    I had Mexican food there too, although Tex-Mex is its own country with its own laws. Cheese appears to hold elected office. Cumin has voting rights. Plates arrive carrying enough food to make you reconsider whatever plans you had for the afternoon.

    It is not lesser.

    It is simply itself.

    That distinction matters because we have a habit in this country of flattening other people’s food. We take cuisines with regions, histories, arguments, migrations, and generations of memory, then place them beneath one convenient name.

    Mexican food.

    As if Mexico were not an enormous nation.

    As if the border had not moved.

    As if families had not carried recipes across it.

    As if Indigenous traditions, Spanish colonization, African influence, geography, poverty, ingenuity, and survival had not all left fingerprints on the plate.

    Then I came to New Mexico.

    New Mexican food is also its own thing.

    People unfamiliar with it sometimes mistake that statement for regional pride.

    It is regional pride.

    But it is also true.

    Here, chile isn’t merely something added to food. Chile is a declaration of citizenship. Red or green is not a casual question. It is an inquiry into your character.

    “Christmas” is an acceptable answer, though it can feel like refusing to choose sides in a family argument.

    After enough years of eating this way, something happens.

    Your standards change.

    Not because you become sophisticated. I remain a man who can remember canned tamales with something dangerously close to affection. We should never become so refined that we start lying about where we came from.

    But experience widens the world.

    You learn the difference between heat and flavor. You learn that a dish can be spicy without being cruel. You learn the difference between a freshly made tortilla and one that came off a factory line.

    You learn that food tastes different when it belongs where it is being served.

    That may be why I hesitate when someone outside the Southwest asks if I want Mexican food.

    I know they are being hospitable.

    I also know someone in the kitchen might be preparing to place shredded lettuce, cold tomatoes, and orange cheese inside a hard shell, then charge eighteen dollars for the experience.

    I can’t do it.

    Not when I know what is waiting for me back home.

    This is one of the quieter ways a place claims you.

    We often think of home as the place where we were born, where our family lives, or where we made our oldest memories. But sometimes home is also the place that taught us what something is supposed to taste like.

    I did not grow up in the Southwest.

    I came here carrying other foods, other memories, other definitions. I came from a world where tamales emerged from a can wearing little paper coats.

    The Southwest did not erase that boy.

    It fed him.

    Phoenix introduced him to something larger. Texas showed him another variation. Albuquerque gave him red chile, green chile, stacked enchiladas, warm sopaipillas, and the understanding that cuisine is not a fixed object. It is a living record of who remained, who arrived, what survived, and what people learned to make together.

    Food does that.

    It enters through the mouth and quietly rearranges the heart.

    So when I travel, and someone asks whether I want Mexican food, my refusal may sound arrogant.

    It is not meant that way.

    It is the caution of a man who has seen too much.

    I have smelled chile roasting beneath the New Mexico sky. I have eaten tortillas that arrived warm and soft, carrying the small imperfections that reveal the presence of human hands. I have watched people debate red and green with the seriousness normally reserved for theology and football.

    There are some disappointments a person should avoid when he can.

    I would rather eat what the place I am visiting does well. Give me its neighborhood restaurant. Its old diner. Its beloved sandwich. Give me the dish the locals defend when outsiders make jokes about it.

    I will meet that place through its own food.

    Then, when I return to Albuquerque, I will order my enchiladas.

    Maybe Christmas.

    And I will think, with gratitude, of the strange journey that carried me from Taco Bell, through the canned tamales wrapped in paper, and into a life where I know better.

    Not better than other people.

    Just better than to order Mexican food too far from home.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • It’s Too Hot to Cook, But We Still Have to Eat

    It’s Too Hot to Cook, But We Still Have to Eat

    It has been hot here in New Mexico.

    Not simply summer hot, where you expect the afternoon to be uncomfortable and learn to live with it. This has been the kind of heat that makes you reconsider ordinary decisions.

    Like cooking dinner.

    There is something almost absurd about standing in a kitchen on a hundred-degree day and deciding that what the house really needs is a 400-degree oven.

    You walk into the kitchen.

    You look at the stove.

    You think about what you planned to cook.

    And suddenly, a sandwich sounds pretty good.

    There is nothing wrong with that.

    A good sandwich, some chips, maybe a salad or some cold fruit can feel almost perfect when the heat outside seems determined to follow you into the house.

    But you can only eat that way for so many days.

    Eventually, you want something cooked.

    Something hot.

    Something that feels like dinner.

    And hunger, unlike the rest of us, has never been particularly impressed by the weather.

    We still have to eat.

    So after thinking about it for a while, I finally bought an air fryer.

    I had resisted getting one.

    I’ve lived long enough to watch plenty of kitchen appliances arrive with promises that they were about to revolutionize the way we eat. Some of them eventually found permanent homes in cabinets, sitting beside other machines that had once promised to change breakfast forever.

    But this time, the heat made a better argument than any commercial could.

    An air fryer is small. It cooks quickly. Most importantly right now, I can make dinner without turning the kitchen—and eventually the rest of the house—into an extension of the desert outside.

    So I’ve been using it.

    And I like it.

    I know not everyone has one.

    That is worth saying.

    Because conversations about food have a way of becoming conversations about privilege without anyone noticing.

    We assume everybody has the same kitchen.

    The same appliances.

    The same grocery budget.

    The same amount of time.

    The same energy when the day is over.

    They don’t.

    Food writing sometimes forgets that.

    Cooking can become theater.

    Beautiful kitchens. Expensive cookware. Perfect ingredients arranged across countertops. Recipes requiring twenty ingredients, three pans, and an afternoon nobody seems to have to work through.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that.

    Cooking can be art.

    It can be recreation.

    It can be something we do simply because creating something beautiful with our hands gives us pleasure.

    I understand that.

    I love cooking.

    But cooking has another purpose that existed long before anybody photographed a dinner plate.

    Somebody has to eat.

    And somewhere tonight, somebody will come home tired from work, stand in front of a refrigerator, and try to figure out what can be made with what is inside.

    Somebody else will look at a grocery bill and quietly put something back.

    Someone will be feeding children who do not care that the person making dinner has had a difficult day.

    And somebody will be standing in a hot kitchen wondering what they can cook without making an already uncomfortable home even hotter.

    They are cooking too.

    Maybe that is cooking in its most honest form.

    It doesn’t matter that you worked late.

    It doesn’t matter that you’re tired.

    It doesn’t matter that groceries cost more than you expected.

    And it certainly doesn’t matter that it is a hundred degrees outside.

    Eventually, someone still has to answer one of the most ordinary questions in family life:

    What are we going to eat?

    It is such a simple question.

    But those words can conceal an extraordinary amount of labor.

    Because somebody has usually been thinking about the answer long before anyone asks.

    They checked the refrigerator.

    They know what is left.

    They remember what everybody ate yesterday.

    They know what needs to be used before it spoils.

    They know what the family likes and what somebody will complain about.

    They have considered the weather.

    They have considered the money.

    And perhaps most importantly, they have considered how tired they are.

    Then, somehow, food appears.

    We rarely call this extraordinary.

    Maybe because it happens too often.

    Care has a way of becoming invisible when it becomes dependable.

    Dinner appears.

    People eat.

    The dishes are washed.

    Tomorrow comes.

    And eventually the question returns.

    What are we going to eat?

    Families have been answering that question under conditions far more difficult than mine for generations.

    Before air conditioning cooled our kitchens, people still cooked through the summer.

    Before refrigerators kept everything safely cold, people found ways to preserve food.

    Before supermarkets offered strawberries in winter and nearly anything else we wanted regardless of season, people learned to make meals from what grew nearby, what could be preserved, what could be stretched, and what could be shared.

    Somewhere inside that history are countless people whose names will never appear in a cookbook.

    Mothers.

    Fathers.

    Grandmothers.

    Grandfathers.

    Aunts.

    Uncles.

    Older brothers and sisters.

    Neighbors.

    People who stood in kitchens while everyone else waited somewhere cooler.

    I remember some of this from my own childhood.

    When food was being prepared, we children were often chased out of the kitchen.

    We didn’t belong in there underfoot while somebody was trying to cook. There were hot pans, sharp knives, grease popping on the stove, cabinet doors opening and closing, and grown folks trying to finish a meal.

    So we were sent somewhere else.

    Go play.

    Go sit down.

    Get out of this kitchen.

    At the time, I don’t remember thinking very deeply about it.

    I was a child.

    The kitchen was simply where the food came from.

    Only later do you begin to understand what was happening in the room after you were chased out.

    Someone kept track of what was cooking, what needed stirring, what was almost done, and what still needed another few minutes.

    Then, when everything was ready, the rest of us came back.

    I remember something else too.

    My grandmother would bring my grandfather his food before she sat down and joined the rest of us.

    That was simply how things were in her kitchen.

    And in so many other kitchens.

    As a child, I didn’t question it.

    Children inherit rituals long before they understand them. We watch how the adults move around one another and assume this is simply how the world works.

    Grandpa sat.

    Grandma brought his plate.

    Then eventually she sat down too.

    I know people may look at that differently now.

    Some may see an old expectation placed upon women. Others may recognize a particular language of marriage, family, and care from another generation.

    Maybe both things can be true.

    I don’t need to turn my grandmother’s kitchen into an argument.

    I only need to remember what I saw.

    Because what stays with me now isn’t simply that she brought my grandfather his food.

    It is that she brought his food before she sat down herself.

    There is a difference.

    As children, we tend to remember the meal from the chair.

    Someone else remembers that same meal from their feet.

    We remember what was on the plate.

    We remember whether we liked it.

    We remember asking for seconds.

    We remember the conversations around the table.

    The grown folks talking about things we weren’t supposed to understand while we quietly listened anyway.

    Maybe that is one of the strange things about getting older.

    You begin revisiting childhood memories from the perspective of the adults who were standing just outside the frame.

    You finally notice what their hands were doing while yours were empty.

    We remember the food.

    Sometimes I wonder whether we remember the heat.

    We remember fried chicken.

    Greens.

    Beans that seemed to cook all afternoon.

    Cornbread pulled hot from an oven.

    We remember smells that could travel through an entire house and tell us what was coming before we ever saw the plate.

    We remember sitting down.

    We remember eating.

    We remember asking for seconds.

    Memory is generous to the person being fed.

    It can erase the sweat from the person doing the feeding.

    There was labor inside those meals.

    There was time.

    There was planning.

    Sometimes there was sacrifice.

    And sometimes there was simply someone who would have preferred to sit down but remained standing a little longer because the people they loved needed to eat.

    I didn’t understand any of that when I was a child.

    I only knew that eventually we would be called back into the kitchen. There would be food on the table, my grandfather would have his plate, and my grandmother would finally take her seat.

    Back then, I thought that was simply dinner.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • The Quiet Work of Returning to Yourself

    The Quiet Work of Returning to Yourself

    Last week was my birthday.

    Some people say that sentence like an opening bell. Like a reason for noise. Like an invitation to be celebrated loudly and without complication. They wear the day easily. They let themselves be loved in public. They accept the cake, the song, the attention, the little rituals that come with being reminded that you are still here.

    I have never been one of those people.

    Birthdays have always been difficult for me. Not because I do not understand their meaning, but because I understand it too well. A birthday can be a celebration, yes. But it can also be a mirror. It can ask questions you were not ready to answer. It can bring old rooms back into view. Old disappointments. Old silences. Old versions of yourself standing in the corner, wondering why a day meant for joy feels so heavy in the body.

    And still, I was determined to make it through this birthday season.

    That may not sound like much to someone who has never had to survive their own calendar. But some of us know some dates carry weight. Dates that arrive with ghosts. Dates that ask us to be cheerful while a deeper part of us braces for impact. So making it through becomes its own kind of victory. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just real.

    I maintained my workout schedule. Not perfectly. Not with the clean discipline of a man untouched by fatigue. But enough to remind myself that I had not abandoned the work completely. Enough to say, “I am still here. I am still trying.”

    There was pizza. My birthday Hawaiian pizza. A little sweet, a little salty, a little defiant in the way all pineapple pizza is defiant. There was more food than that, too. Ice cream. Cake.

    A cake I did not buy.

    And if you know my history with cakes, you understand that was probably for the best.

    There are some things a man should not be trusted to negotiate with alone. Not because he is weak, but because he has learned himself well enough to know where the trapdoors are. There is wisdom in knowing your limits. There is wisdom in letting somebody else carry the cake into the room.

    I tried to relax. I really did.

    I let myself eat more than usual. I let the kitchen stay quiet more than usual. I did not cook as much. I told myself I was due for rest, and maybe I was. The body had been tired. The mind even more so. There is a kind of exhaustion that does not announce itself with collapse. It just makes every ordinary thing feel heavier. The pan. The laundry. The workout clothes. The blank page. The routine you once built with care suddenly looks like a staircase you are expected to climb with sandbags tied to your ankles.

    So I rested.

    Or I tried to.

    Rest is not always peaceful when you are used to surviving through motion. Sometimes stopping feels like failure. Sometimes sitting still lets the old noise catch up. Sometimes the body lies down, but the mind keeps pacing the room, counting what remains undone.

    But I gave myself what I could.

    Then the birthday passed.

    The cake was eaten. The pizza was posted. The day became a memory. And there I was again, standing at the edge of the ordinary life I had been trying to build.

    The schedule was still there.

    The workouts were still there.

    The cooking was still there.

    The writing was still there.

    The work was waiting.

    And this is the part people do not always talk about. Coming back.

    Not starting over. Not reinventing yourself. Not making some grand speech about discipline while the soundtrack swells behind you. Just coming back. Quietly. Awkwardly. Maybe with a little shame. Maybe with a little heaviness. Maybe with crumbs still on the plate and the body still asking for one more day.

    There is violence in the way we sometimes speak to ourselves after rest.

    We call ourselves lazy. Undisciplined. Weak. We look at a few days of softness and act as if all our progress has been burned to the ground. We forget that life is not a straight road. We forget that healing does not happen on a perfect schedule. We forget that even the strongest people sometimes need to sit down.

    But the return still matters.

    The return may be the real discipline.

    Anybody can begin when the feeling is fresh. When the plan is new. When the shoes are clean, and the refrigerator is stocked, and the mind is full of promises. Beginning has its own electricity. But returning is different. Returning happens after interruption. After cake. After stress. After old sadness. After a week when you did not quite live the way you wanted to.

    Returning asks for something deeper than motivation.

    It asks for mercy.

    It asks you to look at yourself honestly without becoming cruel.

    It asks you to say, “Yes, I drifted. Yes, I am tired. Yes, I ate more than planned. Yes, I stepped away from the rhythm. But I am not gone.”

    That is the sentence I am trying to hold onto.

    I am not gone.

    Salt, Ink & Soul is not just about food. It is about the life around the food. The discipline. The memory. The survival. The return. It is about the meals we make when we are steady, and the ones we order when we are not. It is about the cake we did not buy for ourselves because we knew better. It is about the pizza we made because some small part of us still wanted to mark the day with care.

    It is about understanding that ordinary life is not separate from the sacred. Sometimes the sacred is the ordinary thing done again.

    The workout resumed.

    The kitchen is cleaned.

    The post is written.

    The water poured.

    The next honest meal is planned.

    The body is forgiven.

    The mind steadied.

    The day is taken one piece at a time.

    That is where I am now. Not fully reset. Not all the way back. Not pretending the stress disappeared just because the birthday passed. I am in the middle place. The space between falling out of rhythm and finding it again.

    And maybe that is where many of us live more often than we admit.

    Not broken.

    Not finished.

    Not transformed overnight.

    Just returning.

    There is dignity in that.

    There is dignity in the man who does not feel ready but begins again anyway. There is dignity in the woman who has carried too much and still folds the laundry. There is dignity in the parent who makes dinner tired. There is dignity in the person who walks back into the gym after missing days and does not make a speech about it. There is dignity in the writer who opens the page again, even when the words arrive slowly.

    We are taught to admire the comeback only when it is dramatic. But most comebacks are quiet. They happen in kitchens. In notebooks. On walking paths. In grocery aisles. In the private decision not to let a hard week become a lost month.

    So I am not rushing the reset.

    I am not punishing myself back into shape.

    I am not pretending rest was a failure.

    I am returning one day at a time.

    One meal.

    One workout.

    One page.

    One small act of keeping faith with myself.

    And maybe that is enough for now.

    Maybe that is how we survive the difficult seasons. Not by becoming untouched by them, but by learning how to come back after they have touched us. Not by denying the stress, the history, the exhaustion, or the old ache wrapped around certain dates. But by refusing to let those things have the final word.

    Last week was my birthday.

    I made it through.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • The Table Still Matters

    The Table Still Matters

    I try not to say much on Sundays.

    But this has been sitting with me.

    Food costs more now.

    You feel it at the store.

    You feel it before you even decide what to cook.

    But the part that stays with me isn’t just the price.

    It’s what we’re slowly letting go of.

    Sunday used to mean something.

    Not because everything was easier.

    But because people made time anyway.

    Now we go out.

    We wait.

    We pay.

    We leave.

    And somewhere in that, something quieter disappears.

    So maybe… stay home.

    Cook what you can.

    Nothing complicated.

    Nothing perfect.

    Sit down with people who know you.

    People who don’t need a menu to understand you.

    The table doesn’t need much.

    Just a place.

    A little time.

    Someone willing to share it.

    That might still be enough.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    If this found you at the right time,

    Feel free to like, comment, or share it with someone who might need it too.

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • The Kindness Hidden in a Pot of Soup

    The Kindness Hidden in a Pot of Soup

    Salt, Ink & Soul — Humanity Through Food Series

    Some foods impress, and foods that entertain, and foods that demand your attention with spice or technique or flair. And then there is soup. Soup doesn’t perform. It doesn’t shout for applause. It just shows up—quiet, warm, patient—and asks nothing from you except a moment to breathe.

    I’ve been thinking about that lately: the way soup holds a kind of kindness that almost feels ancient.

    When we were kids, a bowl of soup could fix almost anything.

    Cold hands from staying out far too long.

    A bruised knee.

    A disappointment you didn’t yet have words for.

    Your mother could ladle warmth into you faster than any doctor ever could. The steam rising from the bowl wasn’t just heat—it was shelter. It was a reminder that even if the world out there felt too sharp, too big, too cold, someone still wanted you warm.

    And what strikes me now, all these years later, is how that same kindness follows soup wherever it goes.

    Because the smile someone gives when they’re handed a bowl of soup—the real stuff, hot and fragrant and made with small care—is the same whether they’re nine years old coming in from the cold or a grown man standing outside a shelter on a hard December night. Soup doesn’t judge circumstance. It doesn’t sort people into deserving or not.

    It simply says: Here. Eat. You matter enough for this warmth.

    I’ve written before about my green chile chicken soup—how it’s one of the few dishes I make that feels almost ceremonial. Maybe it’s the Chile. Maybe it’s the slow simmer. Maybe it’s something about putting so much of yourself into a pot that you forget, until much later, just how much you made.

    This last time, the recipe made enough to feed an entire table. Or, in my case, one man for several days. I portioned it into bowls and froze them, little time capsules of comfort stacked in my freezer like quiet promises.

    Yesterday, I thawed one. But instead of rushing it, instead of taking the shortcut the microwave offers, I warmed it the slow way—in a pot, on low heat. Stirring occasionally. Letting the aroma rise up like a memory you didn’t realize you’d forgotten.

    Warming soup slowly feels like a kind of respect.

    A way of honoring the time it took to make it.

    A way of stepping back from the pace of everything else in life.

    When it was ready, I poured it into a bowl and paired it with garlic bread I’d tucked away in the freezer. Not fancy bread. Not homemade. But good enough—especially when its only job was to ensure that not a single drop of soup went uneaten.

    I’m generally not a fan of cold winters. The wind cuts too sharply. The days darken too early. The quiet feels heavier than I’d like to admit. But this soup—this simple bowl of warmth I made weeks ago and brought back to the stove—makes the season feel less like something to endure and more like something to move through gently.

    Soup does that.

    It softens hard days.

    It steadies you.

    It reminds you that survival doesn’t always have to be a battle—it can be as simple as letting something warm into your body and sitting still long enough to feel it.

    And maybe that’s why soup matters so much—not just to me, but to all of us.

    Because the ingredients may change. The hands that make it may differ. The kitchens may range from polished granite countertops to back-room burners in community centers. But the gift is the same:

    Here is warmth.

    Here is comfort.

    Here is something made with care, even if only for a moment.

    And in a world that asks so much of us, a simple bowl of soup can feel like an act of mercy.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

    👉 Keto Green Chile Chicken Soup Recipe

    👉 Simple Garlic Chicken Soup Recipe

  • A Love Letter to Potlucks, Church Basements, and Aluminum Trays

    A Love Letter to Potlucks, Church Basements, and Aluminum Trays

    Salt, Ink & Soul — Humanity Through Food Series

    There’s a special kind of magic that happens when a community decides—quietly, without fuss—that everyone needs to be fed.

    Not in some grand, official sense.

    Not with grants or committees or agendas.

    Just fed.

    Fed the old-fashioned way:

    On a folding table in a warm room that smells like memory, grief, pride, and somebody’s auntie’s best Fried Chicken.

    I’ve always had a soft spot for potlucks. Maybe it’s because people bring their best selves to those tables—literally. Every dish arrives covered in foil and hope, carried by someone who has spent the whole morning stirring and tasting and adjusting because they wanted to show what they could do. Not to brag. But to share.

    A potluck is a quiet confession:

    This is the dish I trust to speak for me.

    And there’s something beautiful about the way people place their food on the table and then pretend not to watch. They hover from a distance—not out of ego, but out of longing. Waiting for that smile. That small nod. That moment when someone tastes their dish and closes their eyes, just for a heartbeat, because something familiar touched them.

    You can’t buy that moment.

    You can only feed it.

    Church basements have their own flavor of truth.

    The ceilings are low. The chairs wobble. The lighting flickers. But none of that matters, because the food—the real food—is honest. Greens cooked down until they surrendered. Cakes that lean to the left but taste like heaven. Macaroni and cheese that could heal almost anything.

    People don’t come to impress in those spaces.

    They come to belong.

    They come to be held by the warmth of a room that has seen everything: baptisms, funerals, heartbreak, and survival. And in every season of life, the table stays set.

    Long before the world used terms like mutual aid, this was it.

    This was the safety net.

    This was how communities kept each other alive.

    No one asked, “What can I bring?”

    They asked, “Who needs to eat?”

    And somehow the table always balanced itself—one person bringing meat, another bringing bread, someone else bringing something sweet, and a few saints making sure the greens showed up so the ancestors wouldn’t fuss.

    It wasn’t organized.

    It was instinctual.

    Care doesn’t need a sign-up sheet.

    It just needs a kitchen.

    I think about those aluminum trays—the ones that bend if you hold them wrong. They don’t look like much, but they’ve carried entire histories. Weddings. Funerals. Reunions. Wednesday nights where people just needed a reason not to be alone.

    Aluminum trays are our generation’s scarred cast-iron skillets: humble, overlooked, essential.

    And they remind me of something I fear we’re losing in our digital, curated world:

    We were feeding each other long before we were performing for each other.

    A potluck isn’t content.

    It’s a community.

    It’s generosity without ceremony.

    It’s survival disguised as Sunday comfort.

    That’s probably why I love them so much.

    Because in a culture obsessed with individualism, a potluck is a rebellion.

    It says: We do this together.

    It says: Come as you are, and bring whatever you can.

    It says: There is room for you at this table, even if life hasn’t been kind, even if you feel small, even if all you could manage today was paper plates.

    Food has always been the language that makes room for the parts of us we don’t know how to name.

    So here’s my love letter—

    to the potlucks, the church basements, the community centers, the too-small living rooms, the aluminum trays carried in trembling hands.

    To the people who show up with their best dishes and their quiet hopes.

    To those who feed others before feeding themselves.

    To the tables that held us long before we had the words for what we were carrying.

    May we never forget how to gather like this.

    May we always remember that survival was never meant to be a solo act.

    And may we keep spreading these tables—wherever we can, with whatever we have—so no one has to face the world hungry, unseen, or alone.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • The Last Ingredient House

    The Last Ingredient House

    I was just running in for a couple of things — Mozzarella cheese, maybe some crushed tomatoes. The kind of trip you make when you’ve already decided the night’s ritual: I was going to make pizza. And by making pizza, I mean the whole thing — crust proofed over two days, sauce coaxed slowly from garlic, basil, and crushed tomatoes, Cheese grated by hand until my knuckles risked losing skin.

    At the register, the cashier noticed the haul — the Cheese, the flour, the good olive oil — and smiled.

    “Making pizza?” she asked.

    “Yes,” I said. And just like that, a conversation bloomed.

    She told me she came from what she called an ingredient house. A house where the kitchen was a kind of altar — stocked with the quiet assurance that if company came calling at the last minute, her mother could turn out a beautiful meal without panic. Beans soaking on the stove, onions already sweating in cast iron, a roast pulled from the freezer because it had been waiting for just such a night.

    I nodded, letting the phrase roll around in my mind: ingredient house.

    My own home growing up was… not quite that. We had food, sure — plenty of it — but a lot of it came sealed in boxes with microwave instructions printed in cheerful fonts. Frozen lasagna, instant potatoes, and cans of soup you could doctor up if you felt ambitious. There was love in those meals, but also an efficiency, a shorthand. Meals that required only heat or water, not intuition.

    The Age of Premade Fresh

    Now, we live in a time where you don’t even need to own salt. Walk into any grocery store and you’re surrounded by the new altar — pre-marinated proteins, ready-to-bake pizzas, trays of vegetables already washed, chopped, and glistening under plastic. Fresh, yes. But fresh in a way that requires no relationship, no waiting, no patience.

    And then there’s DoorDash — the pandemic’s golden child. The savior we thanked when we could not leave our homes, when fear of each other turned kitchens into bunkers. Now it lingers, reshaping our sense of effort. You don’t even have to boil the water anymore. You just scroll, tap, and wait for a stranger to leave your dinner at the door like a sacrament.

    What We Lose

    Standing there at the checkout, I realized I wasn’t just buying Cheese. I was buying memory. I was buying slowness. I was buying back the hours required to knead dough, to wait for it to rise, to smell the kitchen change as it bakes.

    I thought about her ingredient house — the kind of place where a pantry wasn’t just storage but possibility. And I wondered what we lose when we give that up. When dinner stops being a verb and becomes an algorithm.

    There is something quietly radical about knowing how to feed yourself from scratch. About putting your hands in dough, trusting yeast to do its slow, invisible work, and showing up for it when it’s ready. Something stubborn and beautiful about refusing the constant seduction of “just heat and serve.”

    What’s Next?

    Sometimes I wonder what comes after this. If premade fresh is today’s answer, what’s tomorrow’s? Meals that make themselves while you scroll? Nutrition is delivered intravenously, so you don’t have to chew. Or maybe a return to ingredient houses — not as nostalgia but as rebellion.

    Maybe that’s why I make pizza this way. Because there’s a small act of resistance in it. In a world of frictionless consumption, I choose friction. I choose to slice garlic thin enough to smell on my fingertips hours later. I choose to shred Cheese until my hands ache. I choose to wait for the dough to rise because I want the reminder that some things — the best things — cannot be rushed.

    And maybe, if I keep doing this, my home becomes the ingredient house I didn’t grow up in. A house where you can pull a meal out of thin air, not because it’s convenient, but because you’ve kept faith with the slow, stubborn art of feeding people well.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Please click here for my Pizza Crust and Sauce Recipe.

    14-Inch Pizza Crust
    Homemade Pizza Sauce
    Basic Pizza Assembly Guide
  • Beneath the Steam: On Illness and the Old Ways

    Beneath the Steam: On Illness and the Old Ways

    It began like a thief who knew my schedule better than I did—slow, deliberate, testing every door before finding the one left unlocked. A scratch in the throat. A heaviness in the limbs. The faint suspicion that breathing had become less casual, less thoughtless, than it had been yesterday. I told myself I’d push through. I said to myself that sickness is for other people, those who have the time for it. But sickness does not bargain. By midweek, it had settled in fully, an uninvited tenant pressing down on my lungs, hijacking one of the things I hold dearest—my taste.

    Something is humbling about losing your sense of taste. I have crossed oceans for flavor. I have eaten in alleys and palaces alike, chasing the elusive truth of a dish. Food, to me, is not just sustenance—it is memory, culture, love made tangible. And now it was gone. My morning coffee could’ve been hot water from a radiator. My favorite bowl of ramen tasted like broth poured through gauze. Even the memory of taste felt muted, as though my brain were looking for a file that had been deleted.

    We live in an age where you can treat almost anything with a credit card and a ten-minute visit to the pharmacy. Pills for the fever, sprays for the throat, syrups that coat the lungs in menthol haze. Convenience at the ready. But the best cures—the ones that live in the marrow of memory—require no prescription. For me, it begins with green tea, lemon, and honey. My mother’s go-to remedy. The scent alone brings her into the room: the citrus brightness cutting through the air, the floral sweetness of honey sinking into the steam, the earthiness of green tea grounding it all. She swore by it. I still do.

    And then, there is chicken soup. I’ve traveled the country, eaten at the tables of strangers, but if America has a single unifying folk remedy, it is this. In Southern kitchens, Italian kitchens, and even kitchens in California, it’s the same idea, different dialects. Chicken, water, vegetables, salt. Sometimes noodles, sometimes rice. Always the intention to heal. And it works. I don’t know if it’s the steam easing the lungs, the broth coaxing warmth back into your bones, or the simple fact that someone cared enough to make it. But it works.

    There’s a ritual to it. Once the soup is simmering, you find your spot. For me, it’s the sofa, where the sun pools in late afternoon. Pillows arranged just so, blanket at the ready. A remote within arm’s reach, Netflix queue prepared to swallow the next several hours. This is not indulgence; this is convalescence. You let the warmth from the bowl linger in your hands before each spoonful, breathing in the scent as if it were a prayer. You sip slowly, allowing the broth to seep into the cracks that sickness has made in you.

    Recovery isn’t just about medicine. It’s about surrender—admitting that you are, in fact, mortal, and in need of care. It’s about allowing yourself to slow down, to be still, to let the old ways work their magic while the world spins on without you. Green tea and lemon. Honey. Chicken soup. These are not just cures for the body—they are acts of remembrance, of connection to the people and places that shaped you. They remind you that before we had walk-in clinics and urgent cares, we had each other. And sometimes, that was enough.

    By the time my taste returns, I know the sickness will already be loosening its grip. But the tea and the soup will remain, as they always have, waiting for the next time life reminds me that I am breakable—and that the cure is as much about being fed as it is about being healed.

    Click here for the full chicken soup recipe

    https://kylehayesblog.com/simple-garlic-chicken-soup/

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • “Sugar, Memory & Mercy at Largomarcino’s”

    “Sugar, Memory & Mercy at Largomarcino’s”

    A man who’s tasted disappointment in the places that once defined him learns to guard his nostalgia like a brittle heirloom. After Happy Joe’s went corporate cold, I flew home to Albuquerque, full of disappointment and regret. But the Quad Cities still keeps a few sanctuaries, and chief among them is Largomarcino’s—the century-old candy counter where sugar still gets its hands dirty.

    Walk through the front door, and you feel the floorboards remember you, even if the staff doesn’t. The glass cases shimmer with rows of turtles, truffles, and creams—each one lined up like choirboys who secretly spike the hymn wine after service. Behind the marble counter, brass soda taps glint under amber pendant lamps that refuse to be updated. The air smells like vanilla bean and sweet cream spiked with a quiet note of fryer oil drifting in from the lunch nook in the back. It is, mercifully, the same as it ever was.

    I once brought a girl here on a first date, sure that the scent of caramelizing sugar and the soft clink of long-handled soda spoons would say things my teenage vocabulary couldn’t. We shared a sundae, so overloaded it listed starboard. She laughed; I tried to look like the kind of man who casually knows about old-school candy parlors. Truth? I just needed to show her a place that felt like honesty in a world already hustling counterfeit cool. Largomarcino’s obliged. That date briefly made me king of a realm where chocolate crowns are handed out freely, and the only recession is the one your dentist warns you about later.

    On this recent visit, I half-expected the specter that haunts old favorites: the new logo, the laminated menu, the weary cashier whose corporate smile never quite reaches the eyes. Instead, I found the latest generation Largos still behind the counter, still calling regulars by name, still Loading chocolate into various little boxes. The soda fountain stools squeaked the same protest when I sat down, the way old friends groan but scoot over to make room.

    Lunch was a club sandwich—no reinvention, no aioli, just Midwestern humility between slices of white bread—followed by Diet Coke (Yes, I see the irony). I picked handfuls of candy bars and orange-covered chocolate for the friends back in Albuquerque who have heard me sing this place’s praises like late-night gospel. I bought a bag of Bourbon caramel bites for myself, just in case hunger struck early and I regretted it later.

    Is it worth the eventual dental bill? Absolutely. Is it worth the added miles on the treadmill? Hell yes. But more than that, Largomarcino’s is worth the faith it restores—that somewhere, beyond the safe neon glow of fast-casual chains, flavor, and family can still stubbornly share a roof.

    I carried my haul out into the Midwest humidity, sugar sweat already forming on my brow, and realized something simple: places like this don’t just sell candy. They sell mercy. A soft reprieve from processed sameness, a reminder that craft and care can outlast the quarterly report. You taste it in the snap of a dark chocolate almond bark and in the carbonic tickle of a handmade phosphate. You taste the persistence of people who keep stirring copper kettles because machines can temper chocolate, but they can’t temper the soul.

    I will keep coming back as long as there is a back to go to. And suppose the world ever swallows Largomarcino’s the way it swallowed Happy Joe’s. In that case, I’ll tuck the bourbon bites in my pocket, let them melt down to sticky echoes, and remember how good it felt to stand in a room where sugar, memory, and mercy still mingled, still mattered, and still refused to sell out.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • This May Sound Like I’m Angry

    This May Sound Like I’m Angry

    This may sound like I’m angry.

    That’s because I am.

    I’m angry about food.

    But not just food.

    I’m angry about what gets buried with it.

    What we let slip through our fingers.

    What we protect so fiercely that we never get to pass it on.

    Some recipes in families are so tied to memory, and they might as well be spiritual.

    Not written in cookbooks, not on notecards, but in gestures.

    In pinches, pours, and stirs done just so, the things you only learn by being in the room.

    But those rooms are empty now.

    We call it tradition, secrecy, and the selfish need to be the one who gets all the oohs and ahhs at the family gathering.

    To be the keeper of the sacred gumbo, the only one who knows how the sweet potatoes get that crust just right.

    We hoard recipes like treasure, and I get it—maybe it’s the only thing some of us ever had to call our own.

    But it’s not treasure if it dies with you.

    That’s not legacy. That’s vanity.

    And the loss is deeper than ingredients.

    Every time someone passes and their recipe goes with them, we don’t just lose a dish.

    We lose a moment.

    A whole damn lifetime of Sundays.

    Of back-porch stories.

    Of laughing so hard over The Red Kool-Aid and potato salad, you forget how hard life has been for a second.

    Healing as it’s passed hand to hand with every spoonful.

    You know what it’s like to taste a memory?

    To close your eyes and feel the presence of someone who’s been gone for a decade, just because their dinner rolls hit your tongue the right way?

    We lost that.

    Because someone wanted to be special.

    Because someone needed to be seen more than they needed to share.

    And then life happened.

    People fell out.

    Phones stopped ringing.

    The kitchen got quiet.

    And just like that, the recipe is gone.

    And all the meals it ever touched, all the stories it ever summoned—gone, too.

    So yes—hell yes I’m mad.

    Because these aren’t just dishes.

    They’re time machines.

    They’re inheritance.

    They’re how a little Black boy in the Midwest learns about a cousin he never met, not through a photograph, but through how his mama seasons her Greens.

    And we’re letting them vanish.

    We call food “soul” and starve our legacy because we’re too proud, wounded, or petty to pass it on.

    We forget that food was how our ancestors hid love in plain sight.

    That in a world where everything could be taken—freedom, names, land—the ability to make a damn good meal was the one thing they couldn’t steal.

    That’s what we throw away whenever we let a recipe die with a grudge.

    You want to be special?

    Be the one who teaches.

    Be the one who says, “Come on. I’ll show you.”

    Be the one who writes it down—not to post online, but to slip into the hands of the next generation.

    To say:

    This is yours now.

    This is where we come from.

    This is how we survived.

    Because the pot of greens is more than flavor.

    The macaroni isn’t just texture.

    The peach cobbler is not just a dessert.

    It’s home.

    It’s a ritual.

    It’s a reminder of who we were, even when the world tried to make us forget.

    So yes—I’m angry.

    Because we’ve buried too much already.

    I’m tired of funerals where we cry over both the person and the food we’ll never taste again.

    I’m tired of silence being passed off as tradition.

    I’m tired of watching people wait until it’s too late to care.

    If we want our culture to live, we must do more than eat it.

    We have to honor it, share it, teach it, and protect it—not like a secret but like the gospel it is.

    Because in the end, a guarded recipe dies in the dark.

    But a shared one?

    That’s how we stay alive.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

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