Laurel Randolph

Potato chip salad combines crunchy chips with apples, grapes, and blue cheese for bold flavor.

Salt and vinegar chips add a memorable punch of tangy, salty crunch.

A homemade sour cream dressing ties the fresh and savory components together.

I love spices. I have a big kitchen drawer (plus a separate pantry area) stuffed full of them as evidence. Because of this, I prefer to blend my own spices for recipes both sweet and savory. When a recipe calls for an Italian blend, for example, I’ll add a combination of dried oregano, basil, thyme, and rosemary.

A piece in the pilot issue of The Ardent exploring the history of pieing as a form of protest from a first-person standpoint.

I love peanut butter. Ever since I was a kid, literally eating it by the spoonful, the nut butter has been there for me through thick and thin (or creamy and crunchy).

This Southern-style cabbage dish takes less than 20 minutes from start to finish.
Bacon adds rich, salty flavor to the savory, crisp-tender cabbage.
It pairs perfectly with sausage, pork chops, or chicken.

I’m one of three sisters, and all of our birthdays are within a few weeks of each other. My poor mother would make each of us a birthday cake, lighting the candles and going through the whole birthday party rigamarole week after week. She’d ask each of us what kind of cake we wanted, and while we tried to mix things up to keep it interesting, all any of us really wanted was a strawberry cake.

As someone raised in the South, I could always count on a cold pitcher of sweet tea sitting in our fridge, waiting to be drunk. We could be low on food and drinks, desperately needing a trip to the grocery store, but there was always tea. As soon as the pitcher ran out, my mom would bring a pot of water to a boil and pull out the Luzianne family-sized tea bags.
While I don’t make much sweet tea at home, I can always count on my mom to have it cold and ready for pouring when I visit.

The It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Cookbook
For fans of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia who want to don their aprons and take a crack at making some of the iconic foods from the show.

Fresh strawberries have arrived in my neck of the woods, and I simply cannot get enough. Farmers markets and the produce sections of grocery stores are piled high with bright red berries, and I am eating my weight in the juicy, sweet fruit.

As a native Southerner, I am a buttermilk loyalist. While I understand not everyone keeps a carton of buttermilk at the ready, you really should. There are plenty of substitutes, but they just aren’t the same. The real thing is tangy, creamy, affordable, and lasts a surprisingly long time in the fridge. It’s a key ingredient in flaky biscuits, flavorful pancakes, crispy fried chicken, and creamy ranch dressing.

I can enjoy a warm chocolatey brownie cookie in under 20 minutes.
I am a chocolate fiend. I need the stuff daily, preferably in the form of a fun dessert (cookie, brownie, etc.) or a high-quality confection, although I have been known to eat little bowls of chocolate chips when desperate.

Trader Joe's is always dropping new products, but this month I really struggled to keep up. It felt like every single day the grocery chain was plopping new and returning items on the shelves. It was honestly more than any TJ's lover and product reviewer can reasonably handle.

Try this trick for baked potatoes that are fluffy on the inside and crispy on the outside.
It’s hard work for any parent to keep their children fed and happy, and my mom was no exception. She had three daughters to keep sated, all with their own dietary preferences. One daughter was vegetarian and then wasn’t, another became vegetarian but didn’t really eat veggies. Then there was me, the youngest and picky for no good reason. One of the few things I did eat? Meat.

I am one of those people who obsessively checks to see if the stove is turned off. Sometimes I leave the house and think, Did I turn the stove off? Surely I turned the stove off. Then it haunts me until I arrive home later and see that it is, in fact, off. This all stems from the time a college roommate left the stove on all night with a pan of half-eaten tomato sauce on top. I woke to find a completely ruined pan and a heavy thankfulness to be alive.

If there’s one dish that’s nearly guaranteed to bring the whole family to the table (beyond mac and cheese and pizza), it’s a creamy chicken situation. Every time I’ve set a skillet or serving dish full of chicken breasts with a creamy sauce on the table, it disappears in seconds. All the better if I have rice or noodles on hand to soak up the sauce.