Yellow Cake with Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting

I do not come from a family of cooks. My mother has a handful of dishes that she makes well – most of them odd Adventist concoctions such as Chik’n Rice and fried Fri-Chik
– and she can even make a decent filling for an apple pie, though my powers are insufficient to persuade her that butter makes a much nicer crust than margarine. Old habits die hard.

My grandmother also has a handful of faithful standbys. Everyone loves her stuffing. She makes a good vegetarian chili, and I’ve always enjoyed her potato salad.

Still, neither of them are culinarily adventurous women. They are not philosophically opposed to processed food, and neither ever passes up an opportunity to combine condensed cream of mushroom soup with vegetables, pasta, or rice and call it a meal. And hey, even I like this sort of thing … sometimes. But given that these ladies live in Florida – where you can get excellent, farm-fresh produce all year long of the sort I can only wistfully dream of in Connecticut – their near-exclusive reliance on foods that could survive a nuclear holocaust continues to baffle me.