At Our House

     I was brought up on a farm, where we ate -- what else? -- country cooking. The farm was in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, which valley was much like the fictional Placer Valley of my books, though with a distinctly lower crime rate.

     As children do, I took my mother's and grandmother's excellent food for granted. Daddy thought we should be loyal to the butter and cream produced by our dairy farm, and we were, with delectable results. Daddy set the pace by buttering his cake and cookies. (He lived to be 82, in case you wonder. I don't know, he might have lived longer if he hadn't buttered his cookies. It's hard to say. He would put on ten pounds over the winter, when he only worked eight hours a day, seven days a week, milking cows. Then in the spring and summer he'd work off all the excess weight. Maybe you could afford to butter your cookies too, if you worked as hard as he did.)

     I now live in Sterling, Virginia, with my husband, Bill Blackwell, and our tortoiseshell cat, Tivoli Blackwell. Both are strong traditionalists when it comes to food, though it took awhile for Tivoli to whip Bill and me into the shape of the tradition she preferred.

     We had an idea, until Tivoli straightened us out, that she would eat dry cat food. Our previous cat had eaten it with relish. We put the dry cat food into Tivoli's food bowl and waited.

     As you may know, it's a long wait when you put the wrong thing into a cat's food dish.

     She looked at the objects in her food bowl, then backed off in alarm. Something had gone wrong, horribly wrong, she indicated. Nasty things had landed in her food dish. She did not feel it was safe even to put her nose near them, lest the fumes contaminate her lungs.

     And where was her food? WHERE, WHERE, WHERE WAS HER FOOD?

     People owned by cats will understand that this was only the beginning, and Tivoli continues patiently to mold us to her wishes. Like most cats, she has the gift of people-molding.

     Bill and I hope the country cooking and nostalgic stories on this site bring you much pleasure. Tivoli, of course, has other things on her mind.

     Janette Blackwell