Chattanoogan Beth Kirby Is Finalist On Fox's Masterchef

The back-story, sad but true: I hardly knew what real food was growing up. I grew up on Red Food and Kroger: Pop Tarts, Cocoa Puffs, Kraft American Cheese, and JIF peanut butter. We ate at Wendy's on Sunday after church, andFriday night dinner was fried cheese sticks at Applebee's, weekday lunches at Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Chick-fil-A. My only experience with local, home cooked food as a child was at Grandmother's. She took my little brother and I to the farmer's market where she would haggle over the price of sweet corn and buy brown paper bags full of fat green beans, and later we sat on the back porch shucking corn, snapping beans, and cracking walnuts collected from the backyard. Her kitchen was chaotic, perpetually covered in a patina of flour, cookie jars hidden behind mail spilling out of precarious stacks on the countertops. But there was always home-cooked food: bacon grease buttermilk cornbread from a cast iron skillet, drop biscuits, oatmeal raisin cookies, turnip greens, mashed potatoes, and cornmeal pan fried okra. {local milk} is also for her & my gratitude for the cooking genes I'm certain she passed down to me. What's an earnest, agrarian food blog without some Grandmother love, after all?

Despite growing up on processed & fast food, I didn't develop a taste for it. I always wanted something more. My favorite food as a small child was mushrooms browned in butter & sherry at Town & Country (where there now stands a Walgreens on the corner of Frasier and North Market). I remember, not without some degree of emotion born of gratitude, distinctly each first bite of real food: my first salad of tender baby greens with a balsamic vinaigrette when I was twelve; the first piece of toast smeared with nutella when I was seven (which I went home and tried to recreate it, pouring Hershey's syrup on a piece of white bread...a disgusting failure); my first white wine steamed mussel at age nine; the first cup of cocoa made with aztec chocolate, whole milk, and a fresh grating of nutmeg when I was ten; and my first bite of proscuitto in Italy when I was fifteen. I could go on. Each bite of real food was a revelation, an epiphany that changed me, pushing me further towards my passion for food and cooking. I immediately knew the difference between those foods and the processed fast foods we ate at home. And I preferred them, intensely.

{local milk} is for the people, businesses, and farmers that are making Chattanooga a place I'm pleased to call home, a place I've finally grown to love. It wasn't always that way. The Northshore and Downtown are dense with memories milling about like quiet ghosts. As a teenager I was ambivalent at best about Chattanooga, taking it for-granted that I would move away when I was older. I spent the last fifteen years trying to get out. I moved to New Orleans, California, and travelled around Europe every chance I could, only to find myself inevitably back on Tremont each time.

But I've changed over the past decade and so has Chattanooga. The flourishing of creative & artisan foods has me more excited than I've ever been to call Chattanooga home, from the handmade sausages at Link 41 to the meticulous patisserie of The Hot Chocolatier to Chat'O Brasserie bringing foams and sous vide to the Northshore to the bicycle delivered, micro-roasted coffee beans fromVelo. I'm into creative flavor pairings, farm to table food, artisan production, and sustainable practices, and excited by the proliferation of like minded people. {local milk} was created to share this passion for local food & seasonal recipes...as well as to share my illegal cheese schemes, supper club aspirations, confectionery designs, and underground restaurant plot...

She also wrote:

I went further south after high school, studying philosophy & creative writing at Loyola University New Orleans. I had revelations in the form of oysters on the half shell, crawfish boils, muffulettas, and hot beignets there. I spent most of my summers at that time in a small village in the Netherlands, eating homemade bread and stroop waffles at a place called L'abri, which means "shelter" in French. It was there, spending afternoons in the kitchen helping to prepare the communal meals we had, that I rediscovered a love of cooking that originated with my grandmother who passed away when I was 14.

I ended up back in Tennessee like a boomerang (this was to become a theme in my life) in my mid-twenties and years later moved to La Jolla, CA where I forgot about my then recent divorce by consuming copious amounts of uni, hamachi, ceviché, and grilled fish sandwiches. Now, yet again, I find myself back on the North Shore in Chattanooga where I spend my days writing, cooking, baking, and, best of all, disgustingly in love. Being in love changes your eyes, and your eyes change everything.

I've been restless most of my life, spending the majority of my 20's dissatisfied, chasing some sort of spangled rock & roll chimera. But, as late twenty-somethings are wont to do, I calmed down and came to appreciate the mundane & prosaic: the smell of tobacco on his fingers and the shock of gray in his left eyebrow, an antique tea strainer, what I learned from a failed pie crust, and the feet on my first macarons. That is what this space is about.

Perpetual student turned freelance writer, recipe developer, and photographer, the written word, photography, and the culinary arts are my raisons d'être. I like to talk about things like the principle of agrodolce being analogous to the principle of sadomasochism. I sometimes have opinions. I spin gossamer webs. Sometimes I get dense, literary, and philosophical before a bipolar swing to "like totally stupid rad". Sometimes I have very little to say at all. So.

I'm no Martha or Ina. I'm certainly no Rachel or Paula. But then again I think that as we are starting to hunger for real food, we are hungering for real people. I have faith that there is an audience that is more interested in human beings and real life than some staged South Hampton fantasy or deceptively tidy suburban cloisters, neither of which exist.

Don't get me wrong, I like tea towels and bowls of lemons in sun-dappled kitchens, really, I do. And I think cake is swell, grand even. I love the farmer’s market and the flea market and candle lit dinner parties and all of those cheerful, earnest things that seem so ubiquitous on food blogs. But what I’m really enamored with is the texture of life itself from bone marrow to neuroscience, relationships to mortality. I'm not interested in an aseptic silence that avoids discomfort. There are messes, tears, failure, and heartache. And there is sweetness, fresh bread, vertiginously passionate kisses, and good work to be done. And there is poetry in all of it.