sugar + spice
It all began with a recipe or a favorite family dish. A messy encounter with flour or extra vanilla turned into something beautiful.
The time-old stories of reminiscing in one’s kitchen bring a fascinating look into food + how it shapes us.
Whatever brings you to the kitchen table, food brings us together. Let’s meet the gals that brought this project to life.
Meet the founding members. Est. 2020.
Robin LaBrunerie
Robin shared her enthusiasm for food with readers while writing a food column for the Columbia Daily Tribune for several years. Now, whether she's grilling salmon for her husband or creating soup for 100, sharing the enjoyment food provides keeps her satisfied.
Robin supports The Common Ingredient because she has observed that during the current pandemic’s shelter-in-place order many people are turning to cooking as a way to show love and concern for others. This project embraces this same pursuit: love through food.
What drew you to cooking?
When I was 7 or 8, my mom asked me to make the salad for our family of seven. I found myself slowing down to make it very beautiful, colorful and appealing. It became clear to me how food can be a gift to others.
Cathy Salter
As an author and newspaper columnist, Cathy loves writing about food stories rooted in family tradition, regional history, and memory. To help feed people in need during COVID-19, she joined The Common Ingredient in an effort to collect Missouri food stories and recipes and nourish our whole community.
What’s your favorite comfort food?
My mother Alice made the best meatloaf on the planet, served with homemade mashed potatoes and green peas. It was the first meal that I cooked for my husband Kit and his two children forty years ago, and it did the trick. We became a family and the recipe is now legend.
My Favorite Ingredients.
Because Kit’s family and mine share ties to South Asia, our Missouri pantry is always well stocked with jars of ground curry, cumin, turmeric and garam masala, as well as crushed chilies, coriander leaf, Tikka curry paste and mango chutney.
Anne Deaton
For all our lives, family, food, happiness, and gratefulness have intertwined around the dinner table. Urgings from my Italian Mother and Grandmother to “Mangia, Mangia,” and a Sunday invitation after church of “Y’all come eat with us today” from Brady’s Mom have made us appreciate the power of food to bring happiness and gratefulness when prepared or given in love.
Who taught me to cook?
My Mother, Grandmothers, and Aunts --- all great cooks of very simple, nutritious meals.
No recipes involved --- only careful observations and attention to their warnings and tips of what to do and not to do!
My Favorite Dish:
Fusilli Pasta and meatballs, especially with meat sauce which we called “meat gravy.” This was the traditional Sunday meal all my growing up years.
My Favorite Ingredient:
The “courage” to trust my creative instincts especially when substitutions are needed!
Barbara Schlemeier
Barbara has a sincere love for family, friends and food; you can find her baking intriguing pastries almost any day of the week for family and dear friends.
When traveling her favorite place to dine is any restaurant that will let her in the kitchen and share their secret to that most delectable meal she had just enjoyed.
Even the French will share their secrets in you ask in a kind manner!
Linda Cupp
Linda Butterfield Cupp came to Columbia to attend the University of Missouri and both she and her husband, Bill Bondeson, spent their careers at MU. They absolutely love their life in CoMO, love to cook and entertain and have been very involved in the Ragtag Film Society as well as in many other arts and cultural organizations in Columbia.
Nina Mukerjee Fursteneau
Journalist and Author Nina Mukerjee Furstenau admires the way cultures entwine over food—and loves that The Common Ingredient project is focused on helping neighbors in need through recipes. She sees no better way to support each other than through satisfying hunger. Some of her fondest memories involve taste—from the nectar at the base of honeysuckle blossoms picked as a child to goodies from her mother’s kitchen.
What is the first dish you ever made?
It was a tiny yellow cake fresh from my Susy Homemaker Easy Bake Oven. The heat source was a light bulb, and the taste of that first cake was delightful enough to make me launch into full scale baking not long after.
What’s your favorite comfort food?
Tough to choose one (!) but keema, a curry of minced meat and peas, served with fragrant rice might top my list.
Holly Enowski
As a science and agricultural journalism graduate from the University of Missouri (fight Tiger!), Holly has always had an affinity for communicating about the food industry. Growing up on a farm, her perspective of food is shaped by Farmer Bob and the hard work and immense effort it takes to feed the masses.
What’s your favorite comfort food?
Chicken + waffles…for no sentimental reason. I just really like the flavors together.
Favorite food? Buffalo hot wings. period.
the hotter, the better..
Favorite Dish?
Sautéed okra. from the garden.
My brothers and I (we’re triplets!) still fight over it to this day.
It’s a delicacy in my family.
Honestly — any country dish.
B.E.L.T sandwiches, asparagus + bacon, pea salad, fried chicken.
Virginia River Valley TCI Committee
Grace Youhas
For most of my life, cook has been a four-letter word. It all started with bouncing cornbread that I made when I was 13. (My six-year old sister rolled a piece into a ball and bounced it.) Later, the first meal I made for my new husband was spaghetti and meat sauce, but I had picked up macaroni instead of spaghetti—imagine that mouthful of pasta.
And it goes on—-turkeys roasted with the giblets bag still inside the cavity; blackberries turned not into mouth-watering jam but cement; chunks of cakes left behind in the bundt pan then reattached to the mother cake, a little askew, with super glue frosting.
But all that misfortune had rewards—smiles galore from my younger sister that she could make bread bounce; a pat on the head and a kiss on the cheek from my father for whom I had made the cornbread; a heartfelt Chianti toast for at least trying to prepare our first Italian meal.
And the common ingredient? LOVE. Love for family, love for culinary challenges, love for sitting down together and sharing our food and our lives, with family, friends, soon-to-be friends, and strangers.
Learning to cook, although fraught with danger,(did I mention the grease fire while frying catfish?) nevertheless taught me three important lessons:
Perseverance—never give up even if a chunk of bundt cake always sticks to the pan.
Look before you leap—read the entire recipe before making your dish so you will know where the giblets are hidden.
Above all, reverence—reverence for this two million-year-old art that binds us together and reverence for each other no matter where we are in our journey called life.
Suzi Austin
My adventures into cooking began with making a French salad dressing with my Aunt Clara when I was around eight years old. Mother was interested in good nutrition so introduced me to Adele Davis and the like. As a result, I made Adele’s granola and loved it. Mother also bought an early copy of The Art of French Cooking, Julia Child’s first book. She loved vegetables and focused on that method of cooking them. I however, embraced the whole cookbook and was intrigued with Julia’s master recipes which opened so many options to explore new dishes and tastes. Julia was my second mentor and later turned me forever into a joyful cook. This knowledge rested in the back of my head until after college where I still didn’t like breakfast and various tastes and smells, retreating to Hot Shoppes to get away from what the college was serving.
The desire to cook arrived while in Florence, Italy as an au-pair to two little girls. Franca, my signora, was a wonderful cook whom I watched every evening create small but delicious suppers. I wanted to cook like Franca, with the fresh ingredients, cheese and olive oil. My life was changed thereafter in wanting to recreate those tastes I experienced in Florence so long ago.
Marriage gave me the opportunities to create most any dish to the appreciation of my dear husband, John. John had been raised in Argentina until college age when he came to the US. His dear mother always set a lovely and delicious table so John grew up loving good food. If not for his encouragement, I probably would not have been so enthusiastic about making daily meals. Meals are still central to our enjoyment of life and ever open to new opportunities to learn from the fabulous world of food!
My comfort food: what gives me joy and comfort are noodles and dumplings of all kinds. Thai wide noodles are especially comforting with their silky feel and chewy texture. Chicken and dumplings are a close second, loving the airy and light texture of the dumplings. Never met a noodle or dumpling I didn’t like!