Otis's Kitchen

My mother ran a farm kitchen outside Cedar Rapids and fed eight people a day out of it. She never owned a recipe card. Everything she knew was in her head, and when she died in 2004 most of it went into the ground with her.

I'm Otis. I spent forty years picking barns and estate auctions across the Midwest, so I know what it looks like when something valuable gets thrown out because nobody recognized it. This channel is me getting down what I can of hers before it goes the same way.

The tricks, not the recipes. Why cold hands make layers. Why the skillet has to be screaming. What a farm wife did with half a pound of sausage and eleven men at the table.

Some of it the food scientists have caught up to and explained. Some of it was just a woman with one hog, one cow and eleven miles of gravel between her and a store. And where she had the right rule for the wrong reason, I'll say so — I'd rather be useful than romantic.

New video every week.