Food For Thought: The Don Effect Blog

The Don Effect: An Evening of Food, Performance, and Stories, an original dance theatre piece created by Goat in the Road Productions, explores the struggle to recreate originals, including family recipes. Not only do we try to recreate the food, but also we try to revisit the memories connected to the taste.


1. This blog is a place for you to contribute your story.

What is your favorite family recipe and why? What is the story behind it? How is it made? Have you ever tried to recreate it? What moment or person does it bring you back to?

We invite you to share your ingredients and your memories with us. Post a recipe story below and it may become a part of the Performance and the Archive.


2. You can ALSO exhibit your personal artifacts at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum


GRP is partnering with the Southern Food and Beverage Museum

(SoFAB) to make this Don Effect experience one that also documents memory, food and dance.


In addition to sharing recipes & stories here, bring a personal food memory artifact - a menu, recipe box, or other - to the show.


GRP will guest curate an exhibit of these audience-donated items as SoFAB, making memory tangible long after the curtain closes.


You may also visit the museum and leave your artifacts there. Receive one half off the regular price of admission to SoFAB with your ticket to The Don Effect.


Performance Info: 

The Don Effect

Goat in the Productions

June 10-13th 9:00pm (followed by food, drink, and merriment)

Candle Factory: 4537 North Robertson

Tickets $10 at the door



Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Saturday morning waffles

Daniel was the cook. I was the watcher. Daniel would cook and I would watch.

Daniel was the cook and he liked to bake too and he cooked two things on Saturday mornings before cartoons - pancakes or waffles. Those were the choices. Panckakes were cooked on the griddle topped with butter and syrup Vermont maple syrup kept in the fridge so it had to be heated in the microwave before you put it on the pancake.

Footnote: mom didn’t know how to work a microwave when we first got it and put hamburgers in there to cook but for too long, for the length you would in the oven; she cooked them for 10 minutes in the microwave, and well, that’s too long.

So that was pancakes. Waffles were different, heart shaped waffle iron, syrup and butter on top. We reminded ourselves that this is how they made the first Nike shoes.

Daniel was just learning how to read these sorts of things; measurements and cups when he started cooking on saturday morning so that mom and dad didn’t have to get up so early for cartoons, and so mom drew all the bowls and cups and spoons on the recipe so he’d know which was which. This was sacred – an index card kept in a wooden box of index cards with old family recipes, wisdom passed down and all that. Later, though, mom said she didn’t have any recipes from her mom and the box of index cards were just a few things she had collected over the years, nothing special she said. Nothing special.

The recipe: First you mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, in big red bowl. The white bowl was smaller and that’s where you mixed the wet ingredients, and then together with a whisk. The batter dripped off the whisk and was bitter to the taste. Seemed like it would taste like cookie batter but didn’t.

And I never learned how to cook these various things that he went on to cook; the famous oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, key-lime pie, the chocolate cake, the scones, the chocolate tort, biscotti.


I was the watcher. Daniel would cook and I would watch.