Trisha Yearwood loves food — the warmth, the creativity, the memories certain dishes evoke. The country music star wrote her first cookbook, “Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen,” with her mother and her sister as a way to memorialize her father and keep him alive through their shared love of favorite recipes.

“It was so personal,” Yearwood said. “Once we finished, I thought there would never be another book like that.”

The cookbook became a #1 New York Times bestseller, and the singer, actress and entrepreneur established herself as a respected culinary voice. She delivered a second bestselling cookbook, “Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood,” in 2010. In 2012, she hosted the Food Network series Trisha’s Southern Kitchen, which garnered an Emmy Award in the “Outstanding Culinary Show” category.

During the early months of the pandemic, she discovered another family cookbook from her Grandma Yearwood. Going over it with her sister, with whom she is very close, they realized there were many recipes that meant something to them and that they wanted to share.

“The recipe for Grandma’s fried pies was in there!” she said. “My dad loved those pies and anytime he had one, he would always say they weren’t as good as his mother’s.”

The long stretch of time spent at home last year gave Yearwood the opportunity to be creative and find comfort in the chaos. The result is her latest cookbook, “Trisha’s Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food for Friends and Family,” filled with 125 family recipes. Each recipe tells a story, from her grandmother’s Million Dollar Cupcakes to Uncle Wilson’s Ice Cream Thing to Garth’s Teriyaki Bowl.

“When you make something your mom made and it tastes the same, there’s a connection,” she said.

Capturing the recipes was also important to her because so many favorite family dishes had no specific instructions, just an idea of ingredients and steps.

“If you have family recipes, write them down and share them with family,” she said. “Don’t take for granted the person who knows how to make a certain dish will always be around.”

This article was first published in The Tallahassee Democrat.

Many people have probably heard of the five love languages: quality time, gift giving, acts of service, words of affirmation and physical touch. I would like to propose a sixth: food.

Joy Sheffield Harris, author of “The Florida Cracker Cookbook,” agrees.

“This project started because I wanted to find out why we eat what we eat in different parts of the state,” she explained. “But I also wanted to capture the recipes from the foods I remember eating as a child growing up in North Florida.”

Harris will talk about the cookbook at Midtown Reader on Friday and Jeri’s Midtown Cafe is providing the snacks.

As we talked, I shared with Harris my fear that in this digital age, we’re losing the art of the hand-written recipe. I’m fortunate to have inherited my grandmother’s recipe cards and more from her mother and other women in our family, but what will the next generation inherit? My Pinterest boards? Harris chuckled.

“I don’t use a lot of recipes online,” she said. “I have my hand-written recipe cards and recipe notebooks. But that could also be because I’m not as computer-savvy!”

These recipes didn’t come easy, though. As Harris was putting the cookbook together, she struggled with them, trying to get them to taste the way they tasted according to her memory.

“My grandmother could look at something and just tell if it was right or if it needed more,” she said. “So many of these family dishes were made by taste, by feel… and it’s also difficult to replicate them exactly because the ingredients are so different now.”

In many ways, this cookbook is Harris’s own love letter, both to her past and to her future.

“My son will never have the experience of visiting my grandmother in her cracker cabin, but he’ll have these recipes,” she said. “If you have older family members, spend time with them in the kitchen. Ask them what they’re doing, why and how. I wish I had done more of that.”

This article was first published in the Tallahassee Democrat.