Brought to you by Boomerang Cincinnatian,
Kelly Shaw

Okie Doke has been a dream of mine since March 2020. I was faced with a layoff from my Corporate Account Manager sales position at ChefStable Catering in Portland, Oregon due to Covid and I started to seriously consider what I wanted for myself. Did I want to stay in the Pacific Northwest? Did I want to move back to Columbus, where I had spent almost a decade? The answer wasn’t immediately clear, but after reading through an old Cincinnati cookbook my Mom had sent me, I started to consider it as an option.

Although I hadn’t lived in Cincinnati since 2008, I found myself dreaming of home . The unique quirks of our food and region, the history, and the passion. What kept ringing in my head over and over was the feeling of comfort at my Grandma Jackie’s house. She had passed away a few years earlier in 2016, the year I moved to Portland, and I didn’t have the opportunity to properly say goodbye.

I remembered there was a constant buzz in her home that was rhythmic. The TV was always on with The Price is Right, Days of our Lives, or the news in the background. The church bells at St. Monica would ring in the near distance, and you could hear Jackie shuffling her deck of cards to restart a game of solitaire. What I realized I was remembering so vividly was the feeling of contentment. This isn’t a story of my Grandma teaching me to cook, although my love for cottage cheese and tomatoes, salted butter, and rye bread surely comes from her. I missed the familiarity, the simplicity of each day, and of course, her.

How could I honor a coming home story, and more importantly, my Grandma? I played with a lot of names, but once I said it out loud, I knew. Jackie would wrap up every phone call before saying goodbye with “Okie Doke, Babe. I love you.”

Okie Doke it was.