This is not that one. The difference is the dressing, and the dressing takes about ninety seconds and four ingredients, one of which is “the zest of whatever citrus is rolling around your fruit drawer.”

Here’s how this particular bowl came together, because the honest answer is “groceries.” Strawberries and blueberries were buy-one-get-one at Publix, which is the only meal-planning system I fully trust; my menu is frequently just a list of what Publix has decided to mark down that week. So I had a lot of strawberries and a lot of blueberries. Then I found half a jar of mandarin oranges in the back of the fridge, the little segments in juice, left over from something I can no longer remember, and in they went. That’s the whole origin story. BOGO berries and a jar I needed to use up.

The dressing is the part worth paying attention to. One cup of Greek-style yogurt, one heaping tablespoon of brown sugar, and the zest of one orange. That’s it. The yogurt makes it creamy without making it heavy; the brown sugar gives it a little molasses warmth instead of flat sweetness; and the citrus zest is the thing that makes people stop and ask what’s in it. I used orange this time because that’s what I had, and orange is the friendly, crowd-pleasing choice. But lemon zest takes it somewhere tangier and brighter, and grapefruit is genuinely wonderful if you don’t mind a little bitterness riding along with the sweet. Lime works too. You really cannot mess this up, so experiment with whatever’s in the bowl.

And listen, if you want to buy the fruit already cut up at the store, there is no shame in this house. None. Pre-cut fruit is a gift to the tired and the busy. If you need a healthy side for a weeknight dinner and the only thing standing between you and making this is whether you have to stand at the counter hulling strawberries, buy the tub of cut fruit, make the dressing, and call it a win. The dressing is the recipe. The fruit is just the delivery system.

Where this really earns its keep, though, is the cookout. Take it to a BBQ and watch it hold its own next to the usual potato salad and coleslaw, not because it’s fancier but because it’s different, and because it’s the one thing on the table you don’t have to nervously babysit in the heat. No mayonnaise means no anxious math about how long it’s been sitting out. (Keep it cool if you can; I’m not telling you to leave dairy in the sun for six hours. But it’s a lot less precious than somebody’s mayo-bound macaroni.)

Add whatever’s in season, whatever’s on sale, or whatever you’re craving. That’s the whole philosophy. Here’s the version I made this week.

P.S. The half-jar of mandarins is the soul of this dish and also a fair summary of my entire cooking philosophy: use what you have, and stop apologizing for it.

P.P.S. Whole-milk yogurt over low-fat here if you have the choice. The low-fat goes a little thin and chalky against the fruit, and we did not come this far to make sad dressing.

P.P.P.S. Zach ate roughly a third of this standing up at the counter before it ever reached the table, which I am choosing to interpret as a five-star review.

Not the mileage (808 miles from door to door) or the hours (a little over eleven if nobody stops, and somebody always stops). I mean what’s under the road. Because you cannot drive across the southern half of this country without driving through its history of racial and tribal injustice. It is not a detour you can choose to skip. It is the route.

I wasn’t on a pilgrimage. I want to be honest about that up front, because it changes everything about how this drive worked on me. My cousin David’s mother had died, an aunt I never met, and I was going to help him deal with her estate. So this was a working drive, the kind with somewhere to be at the end of it. But I’m also a person who stops. I stopped all the way across; for a butcher counter in Birmingham, for cheese dip in Little Rock, for a whole evening with a friend in Memphis. I am very good at stopping for the living.

What I drove past, mile after mile, was the dying.

And that, it turns out, is the whole thing. It’s not that I didn’t stop. It’s what I stopped for.

You leave Atlanta and you’re already in it; Georgia is a two-hour reminder before you even reach the state line. Then you ride I-20 west through Alabama, and I-20 in Alabama is the Freedom Riders. It is Birmingham, and Birmingham is the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four girls were killed by a bomb on a Sunday morning in 1963.

I stopped in Birmingham. I stopped at Mr. P’s, a butcher shop and deli, and I had barbecue, and it was wonderful, and the church was a few minutes away the whole time. I want you to sit with how ordinary that was, because it’s the uncomfortable engine of this whole essay. I did not skip Birmingham. I gave Birmingham an hour and a good lunch. I just gave it to the barbecue and not to the four girls. The church is right there. I stopped for brisket.

You cut across the northeast corner of Mississippi, which most people know as Tupelo, which is to say Elvis. But it’s also Oxford, which is Ole Miss, where in 1962 a man named James Meredith needed federal marshals and a riot’s worth of resistance to enroll in a public university his taxes helped fund. It’s Starkville. This is hill country, not the Delta; the Delta is the other Mississippi, southwest of here, flat and river-fed, and I didn’t drive it this trip. But I can’t pass through the state, on a food blog, and not stop the catalog for a minute to tell you about the thing the Delta gave the country. Because this is a food blog, and because the food is the argument.

There is a thing called the Mississippi Delta hot tamale. If you didn’t grow up near it, it sounds like a mistake; tamales, in Mississippi? But they’re real and they’re old, simmered in their husks, sold for generations by Black vendors out of carts and corner stores and the backs of trucks. Nobody fully agrees how they got there. The likeliest stories run through Mexican migrant laborers who came to pick cotton in the early twentieth century and worked the same fields as Black sharecroppers, and the dish passed between two groups of people who had almost nothing except each other and the work. That’s the Delta hot tamale: two displaced peoples, one piece of cornmeal-wrapped evidence that they fed each other. You can still buy them. The history is edible.

This is the part I keep coming back to. Every stop on this drive is also a foodway, and the road through American racial injustice is the exact same road through the food that the people living under that injustice built anyway. Memphis is where Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, standing on a motel balcony the night after he told a church full of sanitation workers he’d seen the mountaintop. Memphis is also barbecue, and Memphis barbecue is Black barbecue, the slow pit tradition the whole country has spent a century enjoying and a century forgetting to credit. You do not get one Memphis without the other. The grief and the smoke are the same city.

I stopped in Memphis. I stopped hard; I stayed the night. My friend Anna lives there, and we had drinks at Old Dominick, the distillery downtown where her son works, and dinner was a fried green tomato BLT, and it was one of the best nights of the whole trip. I skipped the famous barbecue, actually, because I’d already had mine in Birmingham. So let’s be clear about what I did in the city where they killed Martin Luther King: I had a fried green tomato BLT and a good drink with a friend a few miles from the Lorraine Motel, and I did not go to the Lorraine Motel. I had a lovely evening. That’s the truth and I’m not going to dress it up.

Then it’s Arkansas and I-40, and Little Rock. And in Little Rock, going out, I stopped for cheese dip.

There’s a place called Mexico Chiquito that has been arguing, more or less since 1935, that Arkansas is the birthplace of cheese dip; that a man named Blackie Donnelly, who came up from the Texas-Mexico border, invented the gooey yellow stuff at a dirt-floored restaurant outside North Little Rock before Texas can prove anyone did. Texas disputes this, loudly and forever. Even Lisa Fain, the Homesick Texan herself, has had to concede that the term started with the Donnellys. It’s exactly the kind of contested-origin food fight I love, a small, cheesy version of the bigger question this whole drive keeps asking: who got there first, who said so, and who got believed. I went through the drive through, got a order with chips, and ate it in the car. It was exactly what I expected it to be: rich, salty, flavored with chili powder and cumin.

Little Rock is also Central High School. But I didn’t stop there going out, and there’s a reason that matters, so I’m going to make you wait for it the same way the trip made me wait for it.

West of Little Rock the land starts to rise; the Ozarks come up, and the Arkansas River keeps you company, and you reach Fort Smith on the border. Fort Smith deserves its own post and is going to get one, so I’ll only say this here: it was the edge of what the United States called Indian Territory, the receiving end of the Trail of Tears, the place the federal government marched the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations to after stealing the homelands they’d been promised they could keep forever. You cross the river there and you are driving into the country that displacement created.

Here is where I have to be careful with my numbers, because I almost wasn’t.

Oklahoma is home to thirty-eight federally recognized tribal nations, the third most of any state. Driving from the Arkansas border to Tulsa, you don’t cross all thirty-eight; you cross the reservations of three of the Five Tribes. You enter Oklahoma on Choctaw Nation land. You move into the Cherokee Nation, whose reservation covers fourteen counties in the northeast, including the part of Tulsa east of the Arkansas River. And the city of Tulsa itself, most of it, sits inside the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation.

I want to make sure you understand that last sentence, because it’s not a historical footnote; it’s current law. In 2020 the Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation, three million acres, was never legally disestablished. Most of the city of Tulsa is, as a matter of federal law affirmed five years ago, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Not “was.” Is. The reservation didn’t reappear; it was always there. The map just finally admitted it.

Three nations to get there: Choctaw, then Cherokee, then Muscogee. And here’s the part that actually rearranged something in my head. Once I was in Tulsa, I wasn’t sightseeing the history; I was running errands. Helping David look at houses. Killing a Saturday at a flea market. Ordinary stuff. And in the course of that ordinary stuff, just driving around the metro for a week, I crossed into three more: the Osage Nation, the Pawnee Nation, the Sac and Fox Nation. Six nations on one trip, and three of them I touched not on some solemn drive but on the way to look at somebody’s listing and dig through a folding table of other people’s dishes. You can pull up the Oklahoma Department of Transportation’s tribal boundaries map and watch the borders stack up under you. I did. It is not abstract. It is the ground.

And then you’re in Tulsa. Which is where Greenwood is. Which is where, in 1921, a white mob burned the wealthiest Black community in America to the ground and killed an unknown number of people and then arranged for the country to forget it had happened. That one I’m not going to tell you about today either, but for a different reason than Birmingham and Memphis; Greenwood is getting its own post, later this year, because it needs more room than I can give it at the end of a list.

I spent a week there. I’ll spare you the estate paperwork. What I won’t spare you is what it did to the drive home.

Because on the way back, I stopped at Central High School. The one in Little Rock I’d skipped on the way out, the one I’d driven past with a belly full of cheese dip and somewhere to be. In 1957, nine Black teenagers walked into that building behind a wall of federal troops because the governor of Arkansas would sooner have called out the National Guard to keep them out than let them learn. It is a gorgeous building. It is still an operating high school; kids are in there right now. I stood across the street for a long time, and I want to be careful not to make this sound like a conversion, because it wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was smaller and more embarrassing than that. It was just that after a week of Greenwood and six tribal nations and the whole weight of where I’d been, I could no longer drive past the schoolhouse the way I’d driven past the church. Same trip. Same person. I’d stopped for cheese dip going out and I stopped for the nine going home, and the only thing that changed in between was that I finally started paying attention.

So this is what the drive was made of. Eleven hours each way, five states, and a through-line nobody assigned me, running under the whole length of the interstate like rebar. I didn’t go looking for it. I went to help my cousin sort out his dead mother’s things, and I stopped for barbecue and cheese dip and a fried green tomato BLT along the way, because that is who I am and I won’t pretend otherwise. The history was there the whole time, under every one of those happy little stops. It came up through the tires whether I was ready for it or not.

Michael Twitty writes that Southern food is, at its foundation, Black Southern food; that you cannot lift the plate off the history that set the table. I’d add the obvious extension, which is that you can’t lift the road off it either. The barbecue, the hot tamale, the corn and beans and squash that the removed nations carried west and planted in the territory they were exiled to; it’s all the same story as the church and the motel and the schoolhouse and the burned-down neighborhood. The food is what those communities made while the rest of it was being done to them. That’s not a side dish to the history. That is the history, the part that survived in a form you can still taste.

I’ll be writing about the individual stops including a whole post about Tulsa. But I wanted to start here, with the drive whole, because the size of it is the point. You can do this drive with the radio on and never think about any of it. I’ve done it that way before. I won’t ever be able to again.

P.S. If you’ve driven a long stretch of the South and want to know what you passed, the Equal Justice Initiative‘s work and the Southern Foodways Alliance‘s documentation are both good places to start.

P.P.S. Yes, Tulsa names its north-south streets after American cities, numbered east of downtown by the alphabet. There is an Atlanta Avenue. I drove from Atlanta to Atlanta Avenue. I am still thinking about that.

P.P.P.S. I’ll take questions, and I’ll take corrections, especially on the tribal-nations geography and the reservation boundaries; if I’ve got a county wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it, because getting this right matters more than my pride does.

It’s the second annual Roswell Pride Walk and the first-ever Pride Fest. I went to the inaugural walk last year. I’m going again. And I want to tell you why before I tell you to come find me there.

Here’s the thing that got me thinking about it. I was looking at my own content calendar last week and realized I have posts scheduled clear through the end of June, and not one of them so much as mentions Pride. Fruit salad. Steak. The deer who ate my garden down to nubs. All the things I actually do, and none of the thing I actually believe. I sat with that for a minute, because a throwaway line buried in a Friday Roundup wasn’t going to cut it, and saying nothing definitely wasn’t.

So let me point you to the page on this blog called Where I Stand. If you’ve never clicked it, there’s a list there of what I believe, and the very first line (line one, above food justice, above the environment, above all of it) is that LGBTQ+ people deserve full equality and dignity. Not because it tested well. Because I put it there first, on purpose.

This is the why.

The honest answer starts at my table, because that’s where I do most of my believing.

It starts with Aldin, who y’all have met on here plenty. Aldin is gay, which he’ll tell you himself somewhere in the first five minutes, usually right before he tells you which Ariana Grande era he’s in. He makes and decorates cakes that put my best work to shame. We have a daily Diet Coke ritual (ice, True Lime or True Grapefruit, and don’t you dare suggest otherwise) and a standing Thursday lunch at Playa Bowl, where we both get the Nutella açaí bowl and pretend it counts as health food. He and his partner are Disney people down to the bone; they’re going three times this year, including a quick four-day trip this month for his birthday. He is, in his words, one of the girls, and he’s rainbow and sparkle all the way down, and the world is better lit for it.

It’s Carson, who was my neighbor back at the townhouse and sat next to me on the HOA board, which is its own kind of foxhole. He’s Ari’s neighbor now, and still one of my favorite people to text. Carson is my political partner; we’ve sat through election nights together, compared notes on local and national races, talked through who we’re voting for and why, and eaten a lot of good meals while we did it. He once called me a true ally, which I’ll be honest is one of the compliments I’m proudest of, and he’s a true ally right back, especially for women. He’s also my skin-care guru, because the man knows exactly how to take care of his skin and look incredible doing it, and he’s never once made me feel dumb for asking. Carson is the other half of the rainbow-and-sparkle contingent, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

And it’s Ari, who is non-binary and trans and entirely open about it (they have the t-shirts). Ari runs the local trap-neuter-release colony and is the reason Callie and Finn live in my house instead of under a bush in an apartment complex. For Ari, Pride looks a little different; it’s less about the flag and more about being gendered correctly when you talk about them, which costs the rest of us exactly nothing and means everything. So I do it. They. Them. It’s not hard, folks; it’s just respect, and respect is free.

My values aren’t an abstraction. They have names, and they eat at my table.

It goes wider than my own kitchen, too. A lot of the people who shaped how I cook and how I write about it are queer. Michael Twitty, whose The Cooking Gene changed my life and is the reason I credit African American foodways the way I do, is gay. David Lebovitz, one of the original food bloggers and a big part of why my writing sounds the way it does, is gay. James Beard, the man they named the awards after, was gay at a time when that could end you. Yotam Ottolenghi, whose vegetables I would follow into battle, is gay. That’s just off the top of my head; there are surely others who keep their personal lives private, and that’s theirs to keep. But the through-line is hard to miss once you start looking; so much of the food world I love was built by people the rest of the world kept telling to be quiet.

Here’s the part I don’t usually put on a food blog.

I was born in Dallas, lived there until I was six, and then my dad’s work took us overseas. Angola. South Africa. Singapore. We came back to the States when I was thirteen so my brother and I could go to high school, and I lived in Austin straight through college. Those eight years overseas were the longest stretch of my childhood, and they were foundational in a way Texas never quite was.

South Africa especially. I was a kid in a country that had organized its whole self, its laws and its neighborhoods and its drinking fountains, around the idea that some people were worth less than others for something they were born as. I saw what that does. Not in a textbook; out the car window. And I came out the other side with one conviction wired so deep I’ll never get it out, and wouldn’t want to: every single human being deserves to be treated the same.

That’s where line one comes from. Not from a hashtag. From a childhood that showed me the alternative.

So I’ll be at the gazebo Saturday morning. I believe what I believe. I’m always open to a conversation. I am not open to hate, and I’m done pretending neutrality is a virtue when it isn’t.

Come walk with us. Roswell Town Square, remarks at 9:30, walk at 10, festival until 4. There’s music and local vendors and a bounce house, and there’s open space to throw down a blanket and make a day of it. Find me; I’ll be the one who dressed wrong for the heat.

P.S. There is reportedly an after-party at Pop Alleigh. I am too old for an after-party and I am going anyway.

P.P.S. The bounce house is not for me. I want this on the record. (It is a little bit for me.)

P.P.P.S. If you’re reading this and line one of that list scares you, you’re still welcome here. The table’s big. But the line stays first.

Here’s what’s floating around in my mind and on the web in the meanwhile.

• The Drive Home: On the drive home last Sunday I came through a storm and saw a gorgeous double rainbow arching over the highway. Pulled clean off the interstate for it, and I’d do it again. Double rainbow, wet road, that weird greenish storm light right after everything breaks. Y’all know: when the sky does the thing, you stop the car.
• Send Help: Zach’s been talking about going low-carb (maybe no-carb?) as he gets back into weightlifting and fitness. Y’all. I am not sure how to handle this, and if he’s serious I’m going to have to rethink my entire summer menu. Send help and recipes.
• Pinterest, Reborn: I’m revamping my KaraCooks Pinterest boards and finally working through the backlog of recipes and pins I’ve accumulated over the years. Stay tuned
• Garden Update: This is a sad one. While I was gone a storm took down a limb from one of the tulip trees, and it destroyed part of my deer fence. The predictable results ensued: everything I planted has been eaten down to the roots. I’m especially salty about the Charentais melons being gone because they were looking so full and healthy. The only survivors are the strawberries (under a cloche) and the lemon balm, which is absolutely thriving because of course it is. I’m trying to decide whether to buy some tomatoes and peppers to limp through the season and start planning for next year, or just call it on 2026 entirely.
• What I’m Reading: I listened to Warriors Don’t Cry on the drive home and, y’all. I have no words. I posted about it on my personal FB page, but I’ve got too many thoughts to leave it there, so I’ll likely blog about it later. It’s the memoir of Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine who integrated Central High School in 1957. What she and her friends endured is indescribable and horrific, and this is a book everyone should read (or listen to).
• What I’m Watching (the good kind): Stanley Tucci talked about learning to make a frittata for Big Night and then pulling it off in one single, unbroken five-minute take while filming. If you haven’t seen Big Night, don’t wait. It’s one of the quintessential food movies, and even though it came out in 1996, it holds up beautifully.
• What I’m Watching (the other kind): Zach and I are re-watching Game of Thrones. We just finished the Red Wedding episode. Yikes.
• What I’m Eating: Getting back into the swing of being home. Blackened fish sandwiches, a variation on Vietnamese beef, a few other things. Recipes coming soon.

P.S. To the deer who leveled my garden: I hope the tomatoes were worth it. (It was. I know it was.)

P.P.S. I meant it about the low-carb recipes. Leave them in the comments. I am one “do we really need rice with this?” away from a domestic incident.

P.P.P.S. No, there was no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. The pot of gold was a clean, fresh-smelling house at the end of the driveway, and at this point in my life, I will take it.

Here is the thing I cannot let go of. On my first night in Tulsa, David and I ended up at El Rancho Grande, a Tex-Mex room that has been there since 1953 and looks gloriously like it (I mean that as the highest compliment). The menu had something called PBJ Jalapeños: fresh jalapeno peppers stuffed with crunchy peanut butter, lightly battered, fried, and served with homemade pepper jam. I read that sentence three times. Then I ordered it, because I needed to know what the heck y’all are doing out there in Oklahoma.

Folks, it works. It should not work; I want to be very clear that on paper it reads like a dare. But the peanut butter mellows the heat of the pepper, the jam pulls the whole thing back toward sweet, and somewhere in the middle of all that there’s a fried jalapeño just minding its own business. Salty and spicy and sweet and rich, all at the same time. I have not stopped thinking about it since.

Zach thinks this sounds horrific. He has said so, more than once, with feeling. And I want to go on record now, in public, where it can be used against him later: he is going to eat one. And then he’s going to eat another. And then he’s going to eat a third while telling me he still doesn’t really get it. I have known this man’s eating habits for fourteen years; I know exactly how this ends.

So now I have a project, which is the most dangerous sentence I write on this blog.

The questions, as I currently understand them:

Do I buy a good pepper jelly, or do I make my own? (Making my own is obviously where my brain wants to go, which is precisely why I’m suspicious of it.)

And do I make the El Rancho version (stuffed, battered, fried), or do I take it somewhere else entirely: stuff them, wrap them in bacon, run them on the Kamado Joe until the bacon crisps and the pepper goes soft, and serve the pepper jelly alongside for dipping? Because I think that might be the Kara version. I think the smoke might be the whole point.

Either way: crunchy peanut butter. Only crunchy. The smooth stuff would be a betrayal and I will not hear otherwise.

So consider this the field notes from the obsession, not the recipe. The recipe is coming (at some point; I have to actually make the things first, probably several times, possibly badly). Better photos are coming too, because the one shot I have from the restaurant was taken in lighting that did the jalapeños no justice at all.

More soon. I’m going to go buy some peppers.

P.S. If you’ve had peanut butter stuffed jalapeños somewhere, or you make them, or your grandmother made them and you’ve just been waiting for somebody to bring it up: tell me everything. I am taking notes.

P.P.S. The full Tulsa Experience post (more than one, actually) is coming. Consider this a teaser for a teaser.

P.P.P.S. Zach, if you’re reading this: three. Minimum. I’ve already told everyone.

What it has is muscle memory. I have made this potato salad so many times, starting from when I was tall enough to reach the counter, that my hands know it before my brain does. I bought the russets without checking a recipe. I knew how many stalks of celery. I knew the onion would be yellow, not white, not sweet, not red, because Carol used yellow, and that’s the answer. I knew the mustard was French’s and the mayo was Hellmann’s. Not because they’re the best (although they are perfectly good); because they’re hers.

I’m in Tulsa this week to help my cousin David with some legal things after his mother’s death — an aunt I never knew, which is its own complicated thing I’m not going to get into today. David is Uncle Jim’s only child. Jim was Mom’s baby brother. David is my only living family on Mom’s side, and you show up for your only living family, so I’m here. That’s what family is for. I drove twelve hours here and I’ll drive twelve hours back and in between I am going to cook for him, because that is the part I know how to do.

The VRBO kitchen is small but it has three giant windows and a butcher block countertop that’s so beautiful I’ve been photographing onions on it like it’s a magazine shoot. (It also has a quality knife block, decent pots, and a gas range that actually works, which is a higher bar than most rentals clear. I will probably write a whole post about cooking in someone else’s kitchen at some point; turns out it’s a whole skill.)

So today is potato salad. Friday is a braise; the oven is good and the dutch oven on the shelf is heavy enough to mean business, and that’s all you really need. David is bringing the beer. Mom is not here, but she sort of is, the way she always is in this kitchen, in my kitchen, in any kitchen where I’m making one of her things.

I learned to swear from my mother in this exact moment of this exact recipe. Peeling hot potatoes. Not from my father, not from my Marine ex-husband; from Carol, in the kitchen, with her hands on a potato she’d misjudged the temperature of. Around her mother-in-law, in Meemaw‘s Southern Baptist kitchen, she said “gosh darn it” and “shoot” and “for crying out loud.” At home, with me, she said other things. I will not be putting those things on this blog. But I will tell you that I learned the cadence of a really good curse word from a woman who otherwise wouldn’t say “damn” in front of a stranger, and I have carried that lesson with me through every kitchen I’ve ever cooked in.

A few notes on technique before the recipe card, because the what of this recipe isn’t the interesting part; the how is.

Boil the potatoes whole, in their skins. Don’t peel them first, don’t cube them first. The skin is doing structural work. It keeps the potato from getting waterlogged while the inside cooks through. You drain them the second they’re fork-tender, before the skins start splitting, and then you peel and dice them while they’re still hot enough to make you say words your grandmother wouldn’t approve of. I wear latex kitchen gloves. Carol didn’t. We both got potato salad.

Mix the dressing while the potatoes are boiling. You want it standing by, ready to receive hot potatoes. Cold dressing on hot potatoes; that temperature differential is the entire game. The potatoes absorb the dressing instead of just being coated by it. The flavor goes in. By the time it’s chilled, every piece of potato is seasoned all the way through.

Trust the dressing amount. When you look at the bowl of dressing next to the pile of chopped potatoes, you are going to think I have lost my mind. You will think this is way too much dressing for four or five pounds of potatoes. It is not. I promise. The hot potatoes will absorb every bit of it. By tomorrow you will not see dressing; you will see seasoned potato salad. Don’t scale it down. Don’t try to be clever. Trust the ratio.

Peel them with your hands, mostly. The skin will slip off in big sheets if you cooked them right. Where it sticks, or where there’s a brown spot or an eye, a small paring knife handles it. You don’t need to be precious about getting every last scrap of skin off.

Rough chop the potatoes. You are not making cubes for a magazine shoot. You want chunks that are roughly bite-sized, but uneven chunks are good; rough edges and odd shapes give the dressing more surface area to grab onto. The only rule is that nobody should get a quarter of a potato in one bite. Beyond that, hack away.

Mix it with your hands. At this volume, a spoon will break the potatoes before it distributes the dressing evenly. Hands work better. Clean hands, obviously. Your hands also tell you when you’ve mixed enough, which a spoon will never do.

Make it at least four hours ahead. Overnight is better. This is not optional. Potato salad made same-day tastes like a sad picnic. Potato salad that’s had a few hours to blend and chill tastes right; potato salad that’s had a night in the fridge tastes like Carol made it. The seasoning settles, the onion mellows, and the celery stays crisp because you cut it right (small, but not fine; you want the crunch). Cover it tight. At home I use plastic wrap. The VRBO has foil, so foil is what we use. Everything finds its level either way.

That’s the whole technique. The recipe card is below; the rest of this post is just me, in Tulsa, making my mother’s potato salad in a stranger’s kitchen, for my cousin, on a Monday afternoon in May.

Print

Carol’s Potato Salad

Course Side Dish

Prep Time 20 minutes minutes

Cook Time 40 minutes minutes

Cooling Time 4 hours hours

Servings 10

Ingredients

• 4-5 lbs Russet potatoes
• 1 small yellow onion peeled and minced
• 4-5 stalks celery diced small
• 2-3 spears dill pickle diced small
• 1 cup Mayonnaise Hellman's preferred
• ¼ cup Yellow Mustard French's
• ½ tbsp Lawrey's Seasoned Salt plus more for garnish
• ½ tsp celery seed

Instructions

• Put the whole potatoes, unpeeled into a large pot of salted water and bring to a boil. Cook until fork tender, about 30 mins. Do not let the skins split
Make the dressing while the potatoes are boiling
• Mix the mayonnaise, mustard, chopped onion, chopped celery, chopped dill pickle, Lawrey's, and celery seed in a large bowl. Set aside in the fridge until the potatoes are cooked through.
• When the potatoes are fork tender, remove them from from the pot and begin peeling them. If they're cooked well, the skins will just slip off and you can peel them by hand.
A small paring knife can loosen any stuck skin or cut out small brown spots or eyes.
• Roughly chop the potatoes into bite sized pieces. Don't be precious about the shape, just make them bite sized.
• Mix the still hot potatoes into the cold dressing. I find it easiest to mix with my hand (washed and/or gloved, of course). Don't overmix.
• Chill the potato salad for a minimum of 4 hours but better overnight to let the flavors blend.

P.S. More Lawry’s gets dusted across the top right before serving. It’s the finishing move, like flaky salt on a chocolate chip cookie, except it’s seasoned salt on potato salad and we are not pretending this is fancy.

P.P.S. If you don’t have Lawry’s in your pantry, I have nothing to say to you. I have known you for years and I am disappointed.

P.P.P.S. Yes the mustard is French’s. Yes the mayo is Hellmann’s. I do not want to hear about Duke’s today. I love Duke’s. Duke’s is for other things. This is Carol’s recipe and Carol bought what was at the Tom Thumb on S. Lewis, and the Tom Thumb on S. Lewis sold Hellmann’s and French’s, and that is the end of the conversation.

I’ve been posting the fun stuff to Instagram all week (@karacooks), so head over there for the photo dump this roundup is too dignified to contain.

• I mentioned that I was in Memphis on Friday and hung out with my friend Anna. What I didn’t mention is that her son, Jake, works at the Old Dominick Distillery as a tour guide. They distill gin, vodka, and whiskey and they have a full bar and an event facility. Anna and I started our evening there and Jake and his friends behind the bar treated us to a couple of cocktails that were outstanding. I had a Suckerpunch (whiskey, lemon juice, ginger beer, and Peychaud’s bitters) and then a bartenders choice Old Fashioned (made by Rose, the bartender). If y’all ever make it to Memphis, go! The cocktail menu changes seasonally and the folks behind the bar are all awesome human beings (Rose, Bobby, Matt, and of course, Jake).
• Storms and rain pretty much the whole way from Memphis to Tulsa, which slowed me down some but didn’t make it a bad drive. Just a wet one. The Acura handled it fine and I had good podcasts.
• I have photos and thoughts about crossing the Arkansas River (multiple times). The place where the Ozark uplift meets the Arkansas River Valley is gorgeous and something that a lot of people don’t think about or appreciate when they do think about it. Arkansas and Oklahoma are often regulated to “fly over” territory and I’m here to tell you it deserves more than that.
• I stopped along the way at the Fort Smith National Historic Site, right on the state line between Arkansas and Oklahoma. Y’all, I don’t have words right now. I’m hoping I will later. The site carries so much history about the US frontier and the history of America’s treatment of Native Americans. I’ll be writing a full post later, but I need to sit with it for now.
• My first night in Tulsa, David and I crossed Tulsa’s brand-new musical road, which is a stretch of grooved pavement on the Route 66 bridge over the Arkansas River that plays Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” when you cross it at 35 mph. Emphasis on the “at 35 mph.” We did it the first time at “David couldn’t remember what the speed was supposed to be” mph, which produced approximately three confused notes and a lot of weird noise. So we hooked an entirely-illegal u-turn and did it again at the correct speed. Reader: it works, it’s wonderful, and the travel post is going to have a lot to say about Guthrie and the Arkansas River and what it means to play that song on that bridge. For now, just know that I got a Woody Guthrie singalong through my tires while crossing a river my ancestors stole. More soon.
• Thursday I took some personal time and visited Greenwood Rising, an art and history center in the Greenwood area of Tulsa. I have thoughts and feelings about that as well, but also for a later post.
• I have no Garden Update or Reading/Watching update. I haven’t had time this weekend. The days have been full and busy and I have plans for both a travel post and a couple of specific posts about places I visited.
• Where I’m Staying: The VRBO I’m in is adorable. Probably built in the 1920s, two bedrooms, one bath, tiny living room, tiny dining room, tiny kitchen, all in proportion to itself. The owners have set up a turntable and some records, which is the kind of detail that makes a rental feel like somebody’s actual house instead of a numbered unit. David and I are planning a trip to Josey Records to pick up a few used albums to leave in the collection. Paying it forward in vinyl.
• What I’m eating: So many restaurants and so much VRBO cooking, but here are a few things that stand out:
  • El Rancho Grande, Tulsa. Tex-Mex since 1953, and it looks like it (compliment). First night with David. The PBJ Jalapeños (peppers stuffed with crunchy peanut butter, battered, fried, served with pepper jam) sound deeply weird and are deeply delicious. David got the #1 combo; I got the chile relleno, which was poblano stuffed with chicken and corn under a blanket of cheese sauce. Smoky Paloma came in a clay cup with a chili-salt rim. Full review coming once I’ve gone back for the Nighthawk and the desserts and the neon sign I forgot to photograph because I was too busy eating.
  • Notes of Marrakesh, Tulsa. Y’all. Who ever thought I’d find the best Moroccan food in the world in a tiny little restaurant in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Not only was the food amazing (Chicken tagine with preserved lemons and olives! Lamb tagine with caramelized blueberries! Mint tea! 3 kinds of cookies!), the service was impeccable. We stayed and chatted with the waiter for 20 or so minutes after our meal was over and exchanged recipes for his family’s version of collards and potatoes.
  • I made potato salad (recipe coming next Tuesday) and hamburgers at the VRBO and managed to set off the smoke alarm twice. The joys of cooking in someone else’s kitchen! But I also made shredded braised brisket over polenta with caramelized onions, which sounds fancier than it is and which is the whole point of making something in a VRBO kitchen that really impresses your cousin’s girlfriend when you invite her over for dinner.

P.S. Status report from home: Zach is alive and so are the animals. He texts me approximately once every two days to confirm this fact, usually accompanied by a photo of Remy asleep in a position that defies both anatomy and the structural integrity of the couch. The garden is, by all reports, fine. The cats remain unimpressed by my absence; Finn has apparently decided that my side of the bed is now his side of the bed. I expect a brief power struggle when I return.

P.P.S. I somehow managed to pack two right slippers. Two. Of the same foot. Standing in the VRBO bedroom on night one, holding a perfectly matched set of mirror-image right slippers like a person who has clearly lost some critical executive function, I had a moment of clarity: Remy only eats left slippers and shoes. Apparently he has trained me to keep the right ones in better shape and lose track of the lefts entirely. The pittie won this round from 800 miles away. For the record, I am wearing them anyway. I need slippers and they’re what I have.

The Baking

My standard gluten-free baking uses King Arthur’s “Measure for Measure” flour. It’s a fantastic product: a mixture of rice flours, potato starch, sorghum flour, tapioca flour, and the xanthan gum necessary to create the gluten-like structure in baked goods. I’ve used it in their recipes and variations of their recipes and never had a problem. 

This time it didn’t work. Specifically it didn’t work because Sally’s recipe uses a reverse creaming method that works great with regular flour but absolutely does NOT work when you coat gluten-free flour with fat first and then add the wet ingredients. It makes for a dense, sandy textured cake that doesn’t rise as well as it should. (Note for folks who want to know exactly why: The reverse creaming technique creams the butter, adds the flour, and then finally adds the liquid ingredients. The flour particles get coated in fat before any liquid hits. In a wheat cake, that tenderizes beautifully but it absolutely smothers gluten-free blends that need every chance they can get to develop structure before blending in the fat.) 

My cakes came out of the oven shorter and denser than expected. I knew it right away, but by then it was Saturday evening, the party was Sunday, and there was no version of this where I had time (or energy) to start over. So I soldiered on: I brushed the cakes with lavender simple syrup, wrapped them tightly in plastic wrap, and put them in the fridge to chill overnight. I kept my fingers crossed that the syrup soak would maybe help with the texture. I also made the buttercream and put it in the fridge overnight so I’d be ready to go the next morning.  

Sunday morning I unwrapped the cake and I could feel it in my hands: dense, heavy cake. It didn’t feel like it would be gummy, but it was definitely not a light-and-fluffy cake. It was a cake that was going to slice beautifully and then sit heavy on the fork. I persevered. I crumb coated the first layer, added a piped border to create a “moat” for the filling (if you’re using a runny filling this is the move), poured in the blackberry jam, added the next layer, and finished the crumb coat. So far so good. Everything was working exactly as it should. While the preliminary frosting coat was chilling in the fridge, I smashed a couple of blackberries through a fine sieve and let the juice drip into the remaining buttercream. Ultimately it took 3 of them to get the color I wanted and I wound up with a gorgeous pale violet wash. That was the final frosting coat. And just because I like to live life on the edge, I pulled out my limited piping tools and piped stars around the edges and in the center of the cake. 

The piping did not come out exactly the way I wanted. I am not a cake decorator and have never claimed to be. The frosting and piping is, generously, rustic. 

The jam, on the other hand, was perfect. I used Bonne Maman blackberry preserves. There was just enough tartness to push back against the sweet of the American buttercream, which is exactly the job the filling needs to do in a cake this sweet. If you ever find yourself making a blackberry-anything dessert and you don’t have the time or the berries to make jam from scratch, Bonne Maman is the right call. 

I chilled it again while I was getting myself ready for the party and then right before leaving I arranged plump, fresh blackberries around the top and in a cluster in the center. I had originally planned to sugar some of the berries, but I ran out of time, so that’s for a future cake. Honestly, I’m proud of this cake. Was the frosting rustic? Yes. Was it a little lopsided? For sure. But it was cake and it looked birthday-celebratory, so I moved on. 

The Car Ride

Y’all, I should not have moved on so confidently.

It’s May in Georgia. Not August-hot yet, but warm enough. And even warmer in a car that’s been sitting in the driveway all morning. I started the car and turned on the a/c and let it run for 20 mins before I loaded in the cake. It wasn’t enough. By the time I got halfway to the park, the moats melted in the car. By the time I got to the park, the buttercream had given up on holding anything together. The jam was coming out the sides of the cake, the structural integrity was officially a memory, and we had to wedge paper plates under the cake plate to keep blackberry jam from running out onto the picnic table.

You can actually see it in the cross section photo: the left side of the cross-section is the most visible part where the moat surrendered.

It was a hot mess. A real one. Not a metaphorical one.

The Verdict

Here’s the thing, though: it was a delicious hot mess.

The crumb was dense but pleasant; not as fluffy as the other gluten-free cakes I’ve made, but not nearly as bad as I’d worked myself up to expect. The lavender syrup soak did its job well.

The jam was the star. Tart, not overly sweet, doing exactly the work a filling should do in a layer cake that’s already sweet from the buttercream. The fresh blackberries on top were huge and juicy and gorgeous and people grabbed them off the cake before they grabbed their slices.

The lavender didn’t come through. Everyone agreed; the consensus around the picnic table was that you couldn’t really taste it, even if you took a bite of cake without the jam. The recipe needed more aggressive lavender than I gave it, which is not something I thought I’d ever have to say about a lavender cake. I’d steeped the syrup carefully, infused the milk, used what felt like a reasonable amount of culinary lavender. Turns out reasonable was not enough. Next time: doubled. Maybe more.

And the buttercream was too sweet. This is where Sally was right and I was wrong, and it took me a whole cake to figure out why.

I assumed Sally chose cream cheese as a flavor call to give the frosting tang. But Sally chose cream cheese for at least two reasons, and the one I missed was the structural one. Cream cheese cuts the sweetness in a way that lets the lavender and blackberry actually come through, but just as crucially: cream cheese makes buttercream more stable. American buttercream, without that tang, is just sugar and butter, and on a warm Sunday afternoon in Alpharetta in May it just doesn’t hold up. 

The alternate suggestion, floated around the picnic table by people who were eating the hot mess with their fingers at that point: goat cheese. Tangy without being cream-cheese-flavored, which would honor Ari’s preference. Add a little lemon zest because lemon plays well with both lavender and blackberry. The goat cheese gives you the structure and the tang. The lemon gives you the brightness. The frosting actually has a chance of staying on the cake when you take it out of the air conditioning.

The Cupcake Plan

Standing around that picnic table looking at the cake that had melted into itself, we started designing the next version, which is going to be cupcakes. Hollow out the centers. Pipe the Bonne Maman blackberry preserves into the wells. Frost with blackberry-tinted goat cheese buttercream with a little lemon zest. Top each one with a fresh blackberry.

Cupcakes solve the structural problem. No layers to be uneven, no moats to melt, no jam running out the sides because the jam is inside the cupcake where it belongs. Cupcakes also solve the transport problem; you can chill them right up until you walk out the door, and they don’t fall apart on the way to the park.

I’m going to try it. I’ll let y’all know.

In the meanwhile I’m tagging this one a Redeemed Disaster and leaving y’all with the version of this cake I know works, because I’ve made it before and I should have made it this time too.

Print

Gluten-Free Lavender Blackberry Cake

Course Dessert

Servings 10 servings

Ingredients

Lavender Syrup

• ½ cup water
• ½ cup white sugar
• 3-4 tbsp culinary lavender

Cake

• 2.5 cups King Arthur Measure-for-Measure gluten-free flour
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp baking soda
• 4 large eggs room temperature
• 1 cup milk whole milk
• ⅓ cup vegetable oil
• 4 tbsp butter unsalted
• 2 cups white sugar
• 3-4 tbsp culinary lavender
• 1 jar Bonne Maman blackberry preserves
• 1 pint fresh blackberries rinsed and dried

Goat Cheese Buttercream Frosting

• 1 cup unflavored goat cheese
• 1 cup butter unsalted
• 4-5 cups powdered sugar or icing sugar
• 1 each lemon zest
• 1 tbsp lemon juice

Instructions

Lavender Syrup

Make this first so it has time to steep and cool while you make the cake.
• Bring the sugar and water to a boil in a small saucepan over med-high heat.
• Remove from the heat and add the culinary lavender.
• Let cool to room temperature.

Cake

• Preheat the oven to 325F
• Lightly butter 2 8" round cake pans and line the bottom of the pans with parchment rounds if you have them. 
• In a small saucepan, bring the milk to a simmer (barely bubbling around the edges).
• Add the lavender, butter, and oil and remove from the heat. Set aside to steep.
• Combine the flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and set aside. 
• Beat the eggs and sugar in a mixer until thick and creamy and light gold in color. The mixture should fall in ribbons from the whisk or beaters. 
• Add the dry ingredients to the mixture in the bowl and mix — by hand or on low speed of a mixer — just enough to combine. Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl, then mix again briefly, to fully incorporate any residual flour or sticky bits.
• Strain the lavender out of the milk mixtures and then slowly mix the lavender milk/butter/oil into the batter, stirring on low speed of a mixer until everything is just smooth. 
• Divide the batter evenly between the two pans.
• Bake about 35 to 40 mins or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. If you're using an instant-read thermometer (highly recommend this) the internal temperature of the cake should be 210F. 
• Let the cakes cool in the pan for 15 mins and then turn out onto a rack and let them cool to room temp.
• Once the cakes are completely cool, brush them with the lavender syrup. Be generous. The syrup is doing double duty: adding more lavender flavor and also adding moisture to the cakes. Gluten free cakes can be dry and sandy in texture and this really helps.
• Wrap the cakes tightly in plastic and refrigerate them overnight or at least for a couple of hours. This helps set the crumb and let the flavor develop. A chilled cake is also easier to frost.

Goat Cheese Buttercream Frosting

• Mix the goat cheese and butter until light and fluffy.
• Add the lemon zest and the lemon juice and mix for another minute or two
• Add in the powdered sugar a cup at a time until each batch is fully mixed in.
• Begin tasting after the 3rd cup. When the frosting reaches the desired sweetness and texture, stop adding sugar.
• Mix the frosting for 2-3 more minutes until light and airy and fluffy.
• The frosting can be refrigerated overnight and brought to room temperature the next day or it can be used immediately.

Assembly

• Start the first layer (the crumb coat) while the cake is still cold from the fridge.
• Spread a thin coat of frosting on the top and sides of the bottom layer of cake.
• Pipe a ring of buttercream around the edge of this layer. This is the "moat" that will hold the filling in.
• Fill the moat with Bonne Maman blackberry preserves.
• Set the top layer and crumb coat the whole cake.
• Return the cake to the fridge for 15-20 mins.
• While the cake is chilling, you can tint the top layer of frosting if desired: crush 2-4 blackberries and strain the seeds out using a mesh sieve. Add the juice to the remaining frosting until you get the desired color.
• Frost the whole cake, smoothing the frosting with a spatula.
• Decorate the cake: pipe stars or flowers if desired. Then arrange the berries on top however your hands and patience allow.
• If you're feeling fancy, you can roll the damp berries in superfine sugar and let them dry slightly before adding them to the cake.

Or Just Make Cupcakes

Bake gluten-free cupcakes from the same batter. Cool completely. Use a teaspoon or an apple corer to remove a small well from the center of each one. Fill the well with Bonne Maman blackberry preserves. Frost with goat cheese buttercream tinted pale violet. Top with one fresh blackberry.

You’re welcome. I’m going to be making these.

P.S. The cake was lopsided. The frosting was, generously, rustic. The moats melted. We’re calling it character.

P.P.S. Aldin makes and decorates cakes professionally. I expect he’ll have words on Monday when I see him.

P.P.P.S. The Bonne Maman jam, though. Hold onto that.

Well, y’all. I made it halfway.

This week’s roundup comes to you from Memphis, where I’m crashing for the night before the second half of the drive to Tulsa tomorrow morning. My friend Anna is meeting me for dinner. Twelve hours on the road is too much for one day, especially when you’re doing it solo. So I broke it into two: Atlanta to Memphis today, Memphis to Tulsa tomorrow. Reasonable. Civilized. Or at least more civilized than the alternative.

This is the first long road trip in the new Acura, and I have THOUGHTS. (Brief ones. I’m not turning karacooks into a car blog.) But the short version: the seats are good. The air conditioning is cold. The cruise control is smart. The stereo is excellent. I am not the same person who drove across Texas in a 1979 Plymouth Arrow with a stick shift and no AC, and I am not going to apologize for that.

More from Tulsa next week, where I’ll be visiting my cousin David. There’s a story there I’m working up to telling, but for now, just: he’s my only real living family, and I’m glad to be going.

• Garden update: I left Zach and Callie in charge of the garden. Send vibes. (Zach knows what to do. Callie is supervising. The garden will probably be fine. Probably.)
• What I’m reading: I’m finally doing it. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is downloaded on Audible and queued up for the drive. I have been meaning to read this book for years. Years. Every time someone in my orbit mentions it I think “oh right, I should read that,” and then I don’t. But a twelve-hour drive split across two days is exactly the kind of forced reading time that gets through my “I’ll get to it eventually” pile, and so: now. I’ll report back next week on whether it lives up to the hype.
• What I’m watching: The road. Miles and miles and miles of road.
• What I’m eating: This week the eating section is road food and what’s in the cooler. Here’s what’s keeping me alive between Atlanta and Tulsa:
  • LaCroix, plain and pamplemousse (the only acceptable LaCroix flavors, fight me)
  • Apples
  • Crackers and cheese (the assemble-your-own-snack approach is the best approach)
  • Diet Coke for the moments when LaCroix isn’t enough
  • A LARGE cup of nugget ice from the most recent QT or RaceWay (we’re talking about real ice, the chewable kind, the kind people drive out of their way for)
  • Roasted peanuts and roasted sunflower seeds, because protein on the road keeps me from making bad decisions at hour seven
• The whole point of a cooler is that you don’t have to stop at gas stations for sad food. Pack right, pull over for gas, eat from your own cooler, get back on the road. That’s the move. Next Tuesday’s recipe post is literally road food in disguise, by the way. The “I Just Can’t Cook Tonight” salad would have lived very happily in this cooler if I’d thought about it earlier.

Coming Next Week

Live from Tulsa next Friday: my cousin David and his cats are getting their karacooks debut. Pictures included. (David doesn’t know this yet but he’ll be fine.)

Sunday I’ll have a longer piece up too. More on that when it lands.

That’s it for this Memphis edition. If you’re driving anywhere this weekend, drive safe. If you’re not, think of me at hour seven tomorrow when I-40 starts to feel personal.

Y’all be good.

P.S. The new Acura has a feature where if it thinks you’re getting drowsy it beeps and vibrates the steering wheel. I have feelings about a car making this judgment but so far it has been correct, so.

P.P.S. The 1979 Plymouth Arrow had a hatchback and a stick shift and no AC and I drove it through three Texas summers. Anyone who came up through that kind of car has earned every feature on every car they’ve owned since. This is not negotiable.

So I’ve been redesigning the blog.

I’ll spare y’all the full backstage tour, but if you’ve been around here for any length of time, you’ve watched me cycle through enough visual identities to fill a small museum. Or possibly a cautionary tale. There was the cursive script phase, when the header looked like a wedding invitation and I’d somehow convinced myself that was the move. There was the minimalist phase, where I stripped everything down to a single thin sans-serif and called it sophisticated for about six weeks. There was the phase where I just used whatever WordPress theme I’d downloaded that week. There was, briefly, a phase involving attempting to scan my own handwriting into a font and a logo. I refuse to discuss that project any further.

None of it was me.

None of it was wrong, exactly. It was all things I’d seen working for other people, things that looked like what a food blog was supposed to look like. Soft pastels because food blogs use soft pastels. Script fonts because script fonts feel warm. Lots of beige because beige is calming. And then I’d sit down to write a post about why we owe Black cooks credit for Southern cuisine, or about Meemaw’s cornbread being carved in stone, and the cute little script font would just sit there at the top of the page looking like it was hosting a different blog entirely.

My word for 2026 is Authentic. And one of the things I have come to accept is that you cannot write authentically under a logo that doesn’t know who you are.

So I sat down and actually thought about it. What does this blog actually do? It cooks. It tells the truth about where the recipes came from. It’s garden-to-table. It gets political when it needs to. It talks about Texas and Georgia and grandmothers and grief and the time the oil overflowed and set a kitchen towel on fire. It is not soft pastels. It is not script fonts. It is forest green and burgundy and gold; it is Cinzel for the headers because the words on this blog should look like they mean something; it is Jost for the body because Jost is clean and modern and gets out of the way.

And then there’s the mark.

The new logo is a cross-section of a pepper. Specifically, a serrano-or-jalapeño-style green chile, sliced open so you can see the seeds and the membrane and the structure of the thing.

I want to tell you it was some long deliberative process, but really, it started with me sitting down with a sketch pad and a bunch of colored pencils and just doodling. It was the first thing I drew that felt right. And then it took me down a whole rabbit hole of cutting up a jalapeño and a serrano and a habanero and trying to draw them. (Reader: I’m an excellent photographer but I’m not an artist.) But I got there finally; and the more I sat with it the more I realized why.

A pepper cross-section is not the outside of a pepper. It is what’s inside a pepper. It is what you see when you cut the thing open and look at how it works. That is, more or less, the entire editorial premise of this blog. Cut things open. Show the seeds. Show the membrane. Show how the dish got here, who made it first, what got lost in the transmission, what we owe the people who aren’t credited on the recipe card.

It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a chile. I am from the South and the West. I’m a Texan by birth. I spent a lot of my high school and college years in New Mexico. I married into a family of Coloradans and Arizonians. I roast Hatch chiles every September like it’s a religious observance. The pepper I drew is green and it is hot and it is unapologetic about both of those things. That’s who I am.

Once I had the shape figured out, the actual rendering took a while. The first clean digital version came out looking like it had been generated by an engineering CAD program — perfectly geometric, three seeds at exactly 120 degrees apart, lines crisp as a blueprint. Technically correct. Personally, nothing. I needed it to look like something a person drew, because a person did draw it. So we worked through iterations: hand-drawn line wobble that made the circles feel sketched rather than plotted; a pale green wash that brought the inside of the pepper to life; the cardinal points pulled fully inside the outer ring instead of riding on top of it; the stems extended all the way back to the center because that’s how peppers actually work. The version I landed on is mostly the original structure, just rendered the way I would have drawn it if I were better at drawing.

So: new logo, new colors, new fonts, new everything. I’m in the middle of rolling it out across the site, so things are going to look a little Frankenstein for a bit. Some posts will have the new look. Some will still have remnants of whatever I was doing in 2023. The header might change three times this month. Bear with me.

There’s more coming, too. I’ve been quietly developing a new series called What Got Lost — food history posts that pair a forgotten or distorted story with a related recipe. Some of them will be fun (the banana you’ve never tasted, the orange carrot that’s actually a political project). Some of them will have teeth (the racialization of MSG, the twelve-year-old enslaved boy who is the reason vanilla exists outside Mexico). The first one is in development. I’ll tell you more when it’s closer.

For now: new logo, same blog. Same recipes, same opinions, same Remy lying on the kitchen floor between me and the oven, same Zach asking me what’s for dinner thirty minutes after I’ve told him what’s for dinner.

Just, finally, looking like itself.

P.S. Yes, the logo is going on the watermarks now. If you see karacooks in the corner of a photo, that’s me, not someone stealing my pictures. Although if someone is stealing my pictures, I have questions about their judgment.

P.P.S. The cursive script header is in a drawer somewhere on a hard drive. I will not be sharing it. Some things should stay buried.

P.P.P.S. If you have strong opinions about the new colors or fonts, congratulations. I’m not taking notes.