I’ve loved mushroom soup for as long as I can remember. Mother kept lots of it in the pantry when I was a kid. Naturally, it was Campbell’s brand. I thought it was the greatest mushroom soup in the world.

As a kid, I thought it was really clever to shout, “You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream!”

The Norfolk and Western Railroad was headquartered in Roanoke, Va., when I was growing up there. Trains were a way of life for all of us in Roanoke. We watched them by day as they crisscrossed the city, and lying in my bed at night we were lulled to sleep by the sound of train whistles in the distance – mournful, lonesome, and yet somehow very comforting.

Soup just has to be the most versatile food on Earth. There’s no end to the ingredients you can mix together to make soup. Every culture has its own version.

If you planted a few tomato plants in your backyard in the spring like I did, you're probably in the midst of "tomato overload" by mid-to-late summer. They all seem to ripen at the same time, which can be more than a little intimidating to some of us.

I was probably about 6 years old when my father took me with him to deliver Thanksgiving dinners to the “poor people.” It was the day before Thanksgiving and, now that I think about it, Mother was busy cooking and probably asked him to take me along just to get me out of her way.