Sweet Roots and Tenderloins

I was maybe 13 the first time I decided I was ready to make a pie on my own. My mom, Chris, had been making perfect strawberry rhubarb pies for as long as I could remember — the kind with the beautifully woven tops (a lattice crust, though I didn’t know what it was called back then). And like most teenagers, I thought, how hard could it be?

So we baked. I rolled out the dough, mixed the filling, and spent what felt like forever carefully weaving that top crust, piece by piece. I was so proud of it. Out of pure excitement, I picked it up — a little too dramatically — to show it off to Mom, fully expecting her to rave about my masterpiece.

She opened her mouth to say something… and the entire filling spilled out.

Note to self: lattice crusts are not pie seat belts... and gravity has no respect for ambition.

I was bummed. Embarrassed. A little heartbroken. But Mom just laughed, handed me a towel, and said, “Well, let’s clean it up and start over.” So, we did.

That’s always kind of been our thing. In the kitchen, in life — we cook, we mess up, we laugh, and we try again. Together.

Sweet Tenderloin wasn’t always the plan. My mom, Chris, had been helping my sister with her resort restaurant when she came up with a pork tenderloin recipe that stopped people in their tracks. She loved the idea of doing something with it on her own someday, but wasn’t quite sure what.

Then one day, a reporter from the Fargo-Moorhead paper — who’d been on a mission to find the best pork tenderloin sandwich — happened to try hers. And according to him, the search was over.

That got us thinking: maybe there’s really something to this. Could we actually turn this into something real? A mother and daughter trapped in a box, cooking pork together day after day — and not kill each other?

Well, the first part seems promising. As for the second… stay tuned.