Food & Faith in Our United Methodist Churches
First United Methodist Church of Pearisburg, Virginia, has been making these fruit-filled handheld pies for some 40 years to raise money for different projects. This year, the church made and sold 710 apple and cherry pies to help fund improvements in their building. Particularly in the American South, people of a certain age loooooove fried... Continue Reading →
Meg Carter has “never decorated cookies before,” and she doesn’t consider herself to be a great cook. Yet, she and a small band of volunteers are today wrapping up the baking and decorating of 2,200 cookies they hope will sell at a Texas peach festival attracting as many as 60,000 people on July 10. “It... Continue Reading →
It started out with a humble, home-y side dish in the Easter menu for our drive-thru meal ministry. The enthusiasm for "strawberry fluff salad" led me to write about it for this blog, which led to more enthusiasm. It was exciting when Religion News Service picked up on our recipe and blog and included us... Continue Reading →
Somehow, we got into the business of making old-fashioned salads for our free drive-thru meal ministry at a United Methodist church in Knoxville, Tennessee. That may have happened because we have limited oven and storage space, so we aim to have at least one cold dish to make ahead and stash in the refrigerator. At... Continue Reading →
It’s been years since I did a chocolate Easter egg story. So when I heard the Mt. Olivet United Methodist Women were prepping for a season of peanut butter-mixing and chocolate-dipping, I had to find out more. Mt. Olivet United Methodist Church is located in Galax, Virginia. Nancy Spicer, who the pastor called “the main... Continue Reading →
I’m on a small team of people who run a food ministry in north Knoxville, Tennessee. Our friend Marci Villanueva created these cookies because we need to use up sweet potatoes stored in our freezers, but also because we wanted to provide dessert a little special for last Saturday's free takeout lunch. The sweet potatoes... Continue Reading →
In our last post, we shared a new feature on our denominational website, Our United Methodist Table, and a vintage recipe for Potato Puffs. Here's another vintage recipe -- from 1978 and Macedonia United Methodist Church in North Carolina -- for Lemon Whippersnaps. https://youtu.be/8ND2gUaJLVk Let us know if you try it! You may reach me... Continue Reading →
Oh, how I love those sacred recipes from covered-dish dinners and bake sales of lore, where many are gathered with plastic comb binders and the culinary saints whose names are preserved on the pages will be blessed from tabletops for generations to come. Just kidding, sort of. I have loved cookbooks since my 20s, when... Continue Reading →
You could say Alex Shelton has a bun in the oven, but for the moment, she’s taking a break from baking cakes. That’s because this talented cake decorator is expecting her second child, Sophia Grace, on June 18. She’s staying off her feet until the baby comes, yet the requests for sugary fantasies have not... Continue Reading →
The first time I ever heard of chocolate gravy, I was well into my 50s. "That’s a thing?” I asked. “It’s a Southern thing?” How could I have missed it? Yet miss it I did. I was visiting Camp Lookout when introduced to the notion of ladling warm chocolate sauce over split biscuits for breakfast.... Continue Reading →
The Call to Cook 