"Your Mama's Kitchen" transcript: Episode 26

Your Mama's Kitchen Episode 26: Kristin Hannah

Audible Originals presents Your Mama’s Kitchen, hosted by Michele Norris

COLD OPEN

Kristin Hannah My mom was a stay-at-home mom, and the world was changing around her. And she'd never really lived long enough to do whatever her second act was going to be. That's why when she was ill, I was in law school at the time, and she said, you know, honey, don't worry about it. You're going to be a writer anyway. It was a shocking comment because I really believe it was her dream for herself. That, and of course, the fact that we as mothers know our children so well.

MICHELE INTRO:

Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how the kitchens we grew up in as kids shape who we become as adults. I'm Michele Norris.

Today, we’re joined by the brilliant, award-winning, bestselling author Kristin Hannah. She’s written over 20 novels, several of them securing a spot on the New York Times bestseller list, including The Four Winds, The Winter Garden and Firefly Lane… maybe you’ve seen the Netflix show adaptation of that last one.

She has a knack for writing historical fiction, highlighting lesser-known stories of women who rose to the occasion. That’s exactly what Hannah does in one of her mega-hits: The Nightingale. That was inspired by the true story of a woman who helped Allied pilots escape Nazi territory during World War II. It sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide.

When Kristin is not drawing from history, she takes inspiration from her own, perhaps unconventional, upbringing in the Pacific Northwest. That shows up in some of her works — novels like Firefly Lane and The Great Alone. On this episode, an acclaimed novelist tells her own origin story. We hear how her adventure-seeking father moved her family around the country in a Volkswagen bus, how home was sometimes a campsite and how for a stretch, her mama’s kitchen was essentially a wood-burning stove. Nothing fancy but sturdy enough to cook her mom’s signature buttermilk cornbread. And for all those people who love Kristin Hannah’s writing — we’ll hear about the moment Kristin changed course and left a career in law to start writing novels and how it all began with a conversation with her mom.

All that, coming up.

ACT 1

Michele Norris Kristin Hannah, I am so happy that we have a chance to talk. I met you earlier this year. I was hoping that you would come on this program because you have such an interesting background and childhood, and I thought it would be a wonderful way to learn about your mama's kitchen.

Kristin Hannah Well, thank you. It is just lovely to be here. And it's so nice to see you again.

Michele Norris So you are an author of several bestselling books. People know you that way, but they don't perhaps know much about your upbringing, which is unusual. You moved around a whole lot, and it sounds like it started on a day where your dad came home. You were living in Southern California, and he said he just couldn't handle the traffic anymore and decided to pack everybody up and put him in a VW bus. Is that about right?

Kristin Hannah That's pretty much the way it went from my perspective. We were in Huntington Beach and it was a pretty, actually, idyllic childhood back then. Huntington Beach was lemon groves and little stores and riding our bikes to the beach and just spending beautiful sunny days down here. And my father, who, I guess [was] an adventurer, a wanderer, a seeker, just decided one day: That's it, we are done here. The traffic is terrible. I don't know what he would say about today. And so he took all of us, piled us into the Volkswagen bus with, you know, flower decals on the side. This was 1968. I got to bring a friend. My brother got to bring a friend. So five kids, a dog. And we left for about six weeks. And the point was that we were supposed to raise our hands when we found home. That was the thing. So we just journeyed from state to state looking for the place that spoke to all of us.

Michele Norris This sounds like Travels with Charley. It sounds like the makings of a book or a movie of some kind. First of all, what did your mom think of that?

Kristin Hannah You know, my mom was a gal who really thought, in a perfect world, that camping was not having room service in a hotel. So how it was she put up with all of these travels and the way we traveled? It was always camping. It was always, you know, on the side of the road around a fire pit somewhere. But I think she just loved my dad. And it was a time, you know, the late 60s where everything was changing. Of course, we didn't recognize that, but I think my dad was kind of at the forefront of believing that you needed to live an authentic life, and that you didn't have to follow the path that had been provided for you by a previous generation. And so she just went along with it. And we all pretty much raised our hand in the Pacific Northwest, and I think it was the trees, the mountains, the blue sky. We all just said, you know, this is the place. And we have remained, all of us, a very active and mobile family. We're very nontraditional, but we all, except for my sister, who lives in Southern California, we are all still in the Pacific Northwest, at least, a big part of the year. And that is still home for most of us.

Michele Norris So when everyone raised their hand, was that an egalitarian exercise where, you know, do we like it here? Let's raise our hands. Or was it more spontaneous than that?

Kristin Hannah Let's put it this way. Whatever the truth was, they made us believe that our opinion mattered. And so then it was a question of once we hit the Northwest, it was, where are we going to settle? Where is our place in here? And my father, who is Canadian, came from a very small town in Saskatchewan considered Canada as well. So they took their life savings and they bought a piece of land in Port Angeles, Washington, which was really, to my mind, kind of the middle of nowhere. And then they acquired some land in Victoria, B.C., on the water. And his dream was to build campgrounds. And so the first campground that we built was in Port Angeles. It was called Wagon Train in the beginning. And there we were, you know, chopping trees and creating campsites

Michele Norris So we're going to learn more about how your father moved around the country and eventually the world, and created these campsites. But I want to ask you the core question at the center of these episodes. Tell me about your mama's kitchen. And when I ask you that question, where does your mind go? Because you had physical spaces with kitchens, but it sounds like the kitchen, in many cases, was a little cookstove over a wood fire.

Kristin Hannah Yeah. The first thing that comes to my mind when you say “my mama's kitchen,” and I was trying to wrack my mind to find traditional recipes that I could pass along that were not her concoctions. But when we first moved to Port Angeles, which would have been, I guess, about 1969, they bought this land to build the campground on, and there was a small farmhouse attached to the land. And so we went from a block from the beach in Huntington Beach to this small, 100-year-old farmhouse in Port Angeles. And the biggest room in this farmhouse was the kitchen. And it had one of those old wood burning stoves, you know, the ones where you actually build a fire in the stove, and then you have to use that little iron thing to lift the burner open, like from the 19th century.

Michele Norris Like a potbellied stove.

Kristin Hannah Yeah. Except it was, you know, it had four burners and an oven. And so suddenly, here's my mom, who was, gosh, what, 30 years old or something, 32, is suddenly building fires to cook dinner at night and, you know, learning how to cook like a pioneer wife. So for whatever reason, that's the first thing that comes to my mind because even I at nine said, this is not normal. People don't live like this. We need to do something.

Michele Norris This sounds like it would either be the beginning of a really interesting reality show, or there would be a woman just muttering under her breath all the time or something. I can't believe that I got to start this fire. What? What's going on here?

Kristin Hannah I can tell you which one I would have been. That would be the muttering under her breath woman who said, come on, get me a stove. I'm willing to live rugged, but this is just going too far.

Michele Norris So beyond that wood-fired cookstove. Can you take me inside that room and describe it? The largest room in the house and that 100-year-old farmhouse?

Kristin Hannah Well, okay. So I remember walking in for the first time, and this was a stunning piece of land. I think it was 45 or 50 acres, close to the Olympic Mountains. Not too far from the water. And it was just beautiful, you know, rolling fields and everything. And we drive up the dirt driveway. And again, we're coming from Southern California. We lived in a cul-de-sac and so we pulled up into this white clapboard farmhouse, which needed some work and had next to it a barn that was still standing but could have stopped standing at any moment and walked up the steps and opened this house which had not been inhabited for quite some time. And I remember all of us walking in and just our footsteps crunching on dead insects, because the whole thing was just like covered with it. And it was the beginning of, I guess, a kind of life that all of us ended up gravitating to. And I think really left a mark on my fiction as well. It was just a very different kind of life. And I think we all loved it. My mom loved it particularly. She made a lot of friends there. She had always been into horses. And so we just kind of settled in and as far as cooking and, and all of that, my mom was an eat-to-live human being

Michele Norris Hmm, what’s that mean?

Kristin Hannah It means food wasn't the most important thing on her agenda. So if she was going to, let's say, have a dinner party, which frankly, I can't ever really remember us having, but I'm sure we had to have it would have been about fun and music and cocktails and conversation, and if there was food there to hand out to people, I'm sure it would have been simple food. One thing I remember was, you probably don't know anything about this, but they used to have, like a wooden pineapple that had little steaks sticking out of it.

Michele Norris You would put little food…

Kristin Hannah You remember those? Yes. And you would stick with the little hors d’oeuvres?

Michele Norris Yes. And it would come out of that. It was during the era of fondue where there was a lot of food on a stick.

Kristin Hannah We had a lot of fondue. Yes. I mean, you got Sterno, you got some cheese. You have dinner.

Michele Norris Now I can picture that little pineapple thing. Cheese cubes?

Kristin Hannah Cheese cubes and olives.

Michele Norris Well, I'm glad that your mom settled into the space and learned to love it and made friends and found ways to entertain. When you watched your mom make her way in a foreign land in her own country, what habits and discipline and outlook did you pick up from her that maybe has found its way into your own habits and discipline and outlook as a writer?

Kristin Hannah Wow, what a really interesting question. I don't know that I've ever actually considered that. I mean, you know, from my dad, we learn to value adventure and nonconformity and going your own way. From my mom, we learn to value home in… perhaps it's a nontraditional understanding in that it's not necessarily about place, but that it is very much about people, about experiences. I mean, I was always very aware, coming of age when I did like I said, it's the late 60s, early 70s. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, and the world was changing around her. And so, she was constantly talking to me about being change, about changing, about fighting for what you want, making a path for yourself. And it took me a long time to understand that. I think she was giving me a lot of that encouragement and pushing me down that road, because that had not been available to her. I mean, she had me, I think, when she was about 23, she had three kids by the time she was 27 or 28, whatever. And she'd never really lived long enough to do whatever her second act was going to be. She never quite had it. And I think that's why when she was ill with breast cancer and we were talking about my future, I was in law school at the time, and she said, you know, honey, don't worry about it. You're going to be a writer anyway. It was a shocking comment because I showed no interest in that. I had no interest in that. And one of the things I've learned in retrospect as I've gotten older is I really believe it was her dream for herself. I think that was a big part of why she said that. That, and of course, the fact that we as mothers, and you know this, we know our children so well, we know them better than they know themselves. Not that they're interested in that necessarily, but we see it. And, you know, so I think she did see that, that this was something that I should move towards. And it just took me a while to do it.

Michele Norris But you did. It took you a while to become an international bestselling author. But you did start writing when she put that seed in your head. I read something about you that you wanted to write something together with your mom.

Kristin Hannah Well, that was that was the thing, you know? So she was in the hospital and it was very obvious that she was terminal. But we were coming to the end of this, and I was too young to really understand this moment and, and the things that we could have been talking about and the things that I think we should have been talking about. I think she didn't want to talk about them. She said, let's write a book together. And like I said, it was such a leftfield comment, but I thought, okay, this would be great. This would give us kind of a project to do together. And of course, we immediately started arguing about what kind of book to write, being mother and daughter. I wanted to write horror, and she wanted to write historical romance. Ultimately she said, look, I'm sick. I pick we're writing historical romance, and that's what we did. So for the last like few months of her life, I would go to the library after law school and pick up all of this research information. This is pre-internet, of course, and I'd have to Xerox all the pages. And then I would go to her room and we would just brainstorm this book and talk about it. I think it allowed both of us to imagine this future that was going on instead of ending. But after she passed away and I actually wrote, I should say, I wrote the first nine pages, the day she died. And, I had just finished, when my dad called and said, you need to get to the hospital. And so I was able to lean down and whisper to her, I started the book, and that was it. It meant a lot to me to be able to do that. But after she was gone, I didn't want to be a writer. I was going to be a lawyer. So I just put that all in a box. And, you know, I didn't know that it would it would come back to me, but it did. And I guess that was, you know, that was the very, very beginning, my origin story.

Michele Norris I love that image of you leaning in and whispering to her. I got started.

Kristin Hannah It was powerful for me. It really was. And I feel her with me all the time. It took me a long time to write about her cancer and her death. I wrote a book called Firefly Lane. Years later. And what was interesting to me about that book that I did not realize I started the book at the very age she was when she was diagnosed, and I finished the book at exactly the age she was when she passed away. I just felt her that entire two-year period. I just felt her beside me all the time and that's what we writers do is, you know, it looks like we're out telling a story, but in a lot of instances, we're mining and discovering our own story. And so I went in search of my mother, and I found her the way I find everything of value, really, which is through writing about it, imagining it.

Michele Norris I actually want to reach back because I'm curious about the plot of the historical romance novel you started with your mom.

Kristin Hannah It was terrible, terrible, terrible. And in fact, when I moved recently, I found the manuscript in a box, and I had written across the top of the box not to be published even in the event of my death. Oh, because it was so bad, we thought we were geniuses.

Michele Norris Are you sure it was that bad?

Kristin Hannah I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. That's the problem. When you decide to write a genre that you don't read and, you know. So we thought we were geniuses, both of us. But it turns out there had been a lot of geniuses prior to us who had had the exact same idea.

ACT 2

MIDROLL

Michele Norris In your later works, in Firefly Lane, in The Great Alone, you write about women who have been flung out into the world. And who are trying to figure it out and often experiencing a moment of change where everything is changing all around them. There is a certain consistency with women dealing with something in history that they're trying to figure out, and then the reader is able to sort of understand history from a woman's perspective, which is often not the way history is told or understood. We don't usually get to write our history. Its history and not herstory. Is that in part in homage to your mom?

Kristin Hannah It's hard to say because first of all, this whole idea of writing about strong women, which clearly I do and I'm very much known for now, I didn't even notice that for a decade. I mean, I didn't really realize that that's what I was doing. I started as a young mother, then in Firefly Lane, that was my empty nest year, pretty much. I kind of broke free and decided to write about the issues that were facing my friends, the women I knew myself something that I knew and felt strongly about, which tended to be the travails of motherhood, wifehood, working, the issues between working women and stay-at-home moms and the way that women are sometimes sort of constrained by society and our own choices. And then I reached a certain age, probably 50, and I realized that I wanted to sort of look out more broadly. I wanted to write about women whom I didn't know and challenges that they were facing. And that led me to historical fiction, which started with Winter Garden. And I remember distinctly when I was researching that novel, I came to this sentence in the research that talked about the troops and the storms and the cutting off of Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg in Russia. And the sentence was “Leningrad became a city of women.” That was such a powerful moment for me because, you know, here I am, I've got seven years of college. I went to a lot of high schools. And I realized at that moment that what was happening with women in history was not something that I had been taught. And that was the beginning to say, wait a second. We are not being told the whole story here. And I have an opportunity as a novelist to both share this information to make sure that it's out there and that it's known, but then also to go the extra step and to fictionalize it and make it emotional so that hopefully I can create what is, I think, one of the most important parts of fiction and that is empathy. I feel that if I can, as a novelist, as a woman, as a writer, make someone feel empathy. And concern and a sense of community with people that have lives very different to their own then maybe we can all understand each other a little bit better. And so those are sort of my twin goals. And they have been for the past decade to teach you something about women's history and to, in some small way, make people feel more connected to each other through a sense of empathy.

Michele Norris I understand that because you also in writing about characters that are not very likable, you wind up understanding their motivations. And that's part of empathy also. Right? Is that, people who do bad things are not necessarily boogeyman or boogey women. I mean, they're people who just they took a left turn, they got lost. They lost connection with their own moral compass. And so the research is evident. But there's also something, since we talk about food and kitchens and you're writing about women, it's clear you also do a lot of culinary research, because Winter Garden in particular is just got long, beautiful passages, about the food or the lack of it. And there are book clubs that read your work through a culinary lens that do the dinners that try to do historic reenactments of what you would cook, you know, in that period and in that region. Is that something that you took on also? Were you also doing the culinary research, not in the stacks, but in your own kitchen? Did your family benefit from that?

Kristin Hannah Actually, yes. One of the things that's been most interesting for me, is my own culinary journey. In the sense that I grew up in a home where food was not as important. My mother wasn't in the kitchen for a great deal of time making all of these wonderful concoctions. And I think part of that is she was right at the age where the advertisers came out and said, look, if you want to be a good mother, if you want to put good food on the table, get a Swanson's TV dinner, you know, that'll save you time. That'll be wonderful. There was this thrust for a time to make a housewife's life easier by buying these products. And so we did eat a lot of that. And as I sort of came of age, I did study abroad in London and traveled, in Europe for quite a while. I went by myself at 19, and that was my first introduction to the food of the world to French food, to Italian food, to German food, to and that made a huge impact on me. And so I would say that what has mattered the most in terms of my own kitchen is travel. And part of that travel is book research. Where are the foods that my characters would have been eating? And then I would make them. So, here, family, we're having borscht tonight. You know, we're having whatever it is. And it's been really, I guess, exciting. And now I'm really actually a foodie. I mean, I cook a lot, I love cooking, I love experimenting, and I think, you know, part of that is I love traveling as well. And I love, you know, meeting new people.

Michele Norris When I think about your mom and having to set up in Washington State, and then again and then again because your family kept moving, they stayed there. But then they didn't necessarily put down deep roots there. So she was having to reestablish everybody because it often fell to her to get you comfortable in a new school, meet new friends, set up a new household. How did she do that? And just paint a picture of the sort of geographic pins on the map of where your family wound up moving as your dad was setting up these campgrounds all over the place.

Kristin Hannah Well, so Port Angeles was a small farming and fishing community, in Washington state. But while we were building the campgrounds, of course, it took several years to actually build the campground. So in those years that we were building, he also had to make a living. So he also had to have a job and there were no jobs there. So we would go back and forth between, an area outside of Seattle. We had a place there and we would move back and forth so we'd be in school here for a couple of months and then in school there for a couple of months. And the place near the city was, very upscale bedroom community. And so I was 13 going between farm community and upscale bedroom community, back and forth, back and forth, trying to figure out my place. And, of course, I at 13, I thought it was the worst thing that could happen to a person, you know, having to constantly be uprooted, constantly changing friend groups and all of that. And my mom and dad were just very sanguine about the social ramifications of all of this. They just simply said, this is who we are, this is what we do. You are a smart girl. You will figure it out. Interestingly enough, of course, I'm kind of an introvert by nature. And what this taught me was such a valuable life lesson in that you can drop me into anywhere now, and I will speak to people and make friends, and it has given me a necessary chameleon-like quality. You had to learn how to switch jeans, switch shoes, switch haircut do all these things move in? How to make friends with the people that you wanted to be friends with? Quickly. And I think it's that chameleon ability that has probably more than anything impacted my writing. I can step in other people's shoes and that's what I do, you know, as a writer all the time.

Michele Norris There is something you said just in passing that was so relatable. Switch jeans. I mean, you're probably wearing like Wranglers.

Kristin Hannah Oh, yeah.

Michele Norris In Port Angeles. And then you gotta dress it up. You got to have something that is… what, we're the same age. Bellbottoms?

Kristin Hannah Exactly.

Michele Norris Or something that was a little bit more hip.

Kristin Hannah Yeah. You couldn't be wearing those Sears Granimals when you were, you know, it is the quad just didn't fly. And it was interesting. And it's also interesting that because there's six years between me and my sister, my brothers in between. So in a way, we did not all have this childhood because by the time I was getting older, the campgrounds were making money now. And so now we were able to settle more. So my sister, for example, really remembers her whole life at one school, one town. And, so it’s interesting sort of in talking about the differences we feel among ourselves. And then there was a point when I was, I guess, 18 or 19, right after I'd gone to college, my dad apparently came home and said, yeah, okay, so Washington is now filling up the traffic here is getting pretty bad. I think we're going to Alaska. He took my mom. She must have been 44, 45, whatever. And they went to Alaska for the summer and lived in their truck and looked for the perfect ground for what would become really my fathers and mothers life's work, the Great Alaska Adventure Lodge.

Michele Norris They lived in their truck?

Kristin Hannah Yes, and took showers at the YMCA.

Michele Norris And at this point, you're old enough to argue with them about these lifestyle choices. Did you just roll with that or try to talk them into something else? No judgment in asking this question but…

Kristin Hannah No, no. I was old enough to be at the University of Washington to say, you know, bummer for my siblings. (laughs)

Michele Norris Oh, wait, the siblings were living in the truck.

Kristin Hannah Just my youngest sister, I think. And I'm not exactly sure that's one of those things, because my first year of college things are kind of hazy on the home front. My brother and sister might have stayed with friends for that first summer or that first period. And then they built, what became really just this stunning, stunning location on the Kenai River. And, this is the lodge. I think that that shaped the whole family that led to the novel The Great Alone.

Michele Norris Mhmm, Yeah, I was going to say in that novel, it's clear that Alaska put its charms on you to.

Kristin Hannah Alaska in the summer. Yes.

Michele Norris (laughs) Yeah there is… there is a difference. I visited Alaska both in the winter and the summer. And there is a significant difference. It really is a beautiful place in the summer that never gets dark.

Kristin Hannah Yes. I mean, it's just stunning and the view and the people are unique.

ACT 3

Michele Norris We always ask people to share a taste of home for them. What is a recipe that makes you think about your mama's kitchen and the recipe that you shared with us? Sounds delicious. It sounds like it could be made in a kitchen, but it also sounds like campfire food also: buttermilk cornbread.

Kristin Hannah Well, that's of course, when I sent it to you, what I didn't say was. Yes, you can make this in a cast iron pan on the fire. And that's what we did lots of times when we were, you know, out and about and traveling and. I mean, I can give you lots of things that we ate and that we loved, but something that was, you know, interesting enough to pass along that has sort of stayed in my kitchen, was a little bit more difficult.

Michele Norris Well, what did you eat and you loved that you don't have a recipe for.

Kristin Hannah Oh, well, I mean, I'm sorry. We loved Kraft macaroni and cheese with hot dogs.

Michele Norris There’s no shame in that

Kristin Hannah And did you ever eat fried baloney?

Michele Norris Oh, who hasn’t eaten fried baloney? Where the edges curl up like you watch them. Kind of like curl up on the edge. I mean, maybe if you're vegetarian or if you're come from maybe a fancy background, you wouldn't have had fried baloney. But that was kind of a staple.

Kristin Hannah It was a staple. And one of the tips that my mother taught me, cooking wise was, hey, if you clip the baloney, then it doesn't, like, turn into the little umbrella and it stays flat.

Michele Norris Right, right. You make the little widgets in it.

Kristin Hannah Haha yes.

Michele Norris You make a little divot in the side of the baloney in it, and it stays flat.

Kristin Hannah Yeah I watch all these Food Network programs and travel and I see the southern kitchens and you know my husband's mother came from Texas and the recipes she passed on, like Texas chili and, you know, these wonderful rich meals… that was just not us.

Michele Norris But the recipe you did pass on to listeners, it sounds delicious. And I love that you suggest it with two tablespoons of honey because I love cornbread.

Kristin Hannah Yes.

Michele Norris With honey, I don't like sweet cornbread necessarily, but I love cornbread with butter and honey. Is your mom's buttermilk cornbread. What do you remember about this dish? When did she make it? What do you remember about eating it? Was it something that was really special for you and your siblings?

Kristin Hannah Yeah, it was special. It was Thanksgiving. It was Christmas. It was maybe if my grandparents were coming over, there was just, like, regular cornbread. And then there was this buttermilk cornbread, and it just had more of, like a cakey texture, I guess. So it was thicker. And she would, cook it over the fire and then just cut it right up in the pan. And we would scoop it out with our big spoons and you could eat it as cornbread with butter and jam, but you could also sort of mix it in with something else, almost kind of like a polenta-ish feel today.

Michele Norris So crumble it and put it in a soup. If you having chili or something like that, just mix it right in there. Did your mom have buttermilk. Because buttermilk is not always easy to come by. Or was she making buttermilk? There's a secret if you do it you mix milk with…

Kristin Hannah I think it's lemon juice?

Michele Norris A lemon you can do that. Was she doing that?

Kristin Hannah Yes. And there was a time again. This is so pioneer like it makes me sound so old and I'm not I don't think. But we would get milk delivered and the cream would rise to the top, right. So you'd bring it in and you'd take the cream out and we would actually make butter from the cream. And then she would make buttermilk for these biscuits as well.

Michele Norris Well, I'm going to try this version of buttermilk cornbread. And I look forward to it. And I'm going to have it. And I have to decide if I'm going to want it with butter and jam or butter and honey, or maybe make a big pot of winter chili. Oh, and crumble it up and put it on top of my chili.

Kristin Hannah Well, it makes enough for both. So you can do, like you can have one one night, and then you can crumble it up the next night.

Michele Norris I've loved talking to you. Thank you so much.

Kristin Hannah It's so good to talk to you again. Thank you so much for having me.

KICKER

What a treat to learn about Kristin Hannah’s writing journey and how it was so deeply influenced by her father’s wanderlust and those treks across America in a crowded mini bus. What a novel concept to ask the family to raise their hands when they felt like they were home. The kitchen is always the heart of the home but this episode reminds us that the feeling of home isn’t always about a traditional house with a roof and a picket fence. It is about a feeling that combines some magical cocktail of belonging and comfort and the prospect for adventure.

It was inspiring to hear how her mother was so instrumental in her path to becoming a writer. As Kristin said, mothers know their children so well, sometimes maybe even more than they know themselves. It can take a lifetime for some of us to admit that.

Anybody else have a hankering for a big slab of hot cornbread after listening to this episode?

If you want to learn how to make Kristin’s mama’s buttermilk cornbread straight out of the skillet, you can find it on my Instagram page at Michele underscore underscore Norris, that’s two underscores. AND you can also find it at our website – yourmamaskitchen.com.

AND: We want to hear from you! We’re opening up our Inbox for you to record yourself and tell us about your mama’s recipes, some memories from YOUR kitchen growing up, or your thoughts on some of the stories you’ve heard on this podcast. Make sure to send us a voice memo at ymk@highergroundproductions.com… for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Thank you so much again to Kristin and to all of you for joining me today. Make sure to come back next week – and until then, stay bountiful.

CREDITS

Michele: This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original. Produced by Higher Ground Studios

Senior producer - Natalie Rinn

Producer - Sonia Htoon

Additional production support by Misha Jones

Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Ryan Kozlowski

Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistant is Camila Thur de Koos.

Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and me, Michele Norris.

Executive producers for Audible are Nick D’Angelo and Ann Heppermann.

The show’s closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels.

Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media.

Talent booker - Angela Peluso

Chief Content Officer Rachel Ghiazza

And that’s it - goodbye everybody.

Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.

Sound Recording copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.