About the Author

Deaghaidh??? Recipes – That’s pronounced “Day”, and is the Gaelic spelling of my family name…I’m sure you cannot imagine why in Canada and America it was changed to Dea and Day.  Anyway, as most of my recipes are family inspired or are a link to my ethnic background, I chose to emphasize my family name.

Cooking has always been important to me, as it was always a personal sharing of my family with each other.  The love of cooking has been in my family for many generations, especially on my father’s side of the family.  My grandmother used to cook with her grandmother Elizabeth, an immigrant to the US from Metzenseifen in modern day Slovakia.  I remember cooking with my grandmother and great grandmother as well.  Still, the biggest influence I have had is my step-grandfather, George Hohne.  Whenever I visited, I always lurked in the kitchen where he was cooking something or another.

A little about me, I was born in Ashtabula, Ohio and raised in Conyers, Georgia.  I went to college at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina where I majored in Music.  I came to New York City for seminary, and now live with my partner in Astoria, New York.  Cooking is more than a hobby for me, as it is a way of sharing a little about myself with other people.  I do not have any professional training in cooking.  I love herbs and garlic–you’ll see that in my recipes.

I hope to keep this blog Flexitarian, Vegetarian, and Vegan friendly with options and variations to suit those folks.  A visit to my Symbols page explains if a dish is Vegetarian or Vegan friendly or if there is a variation of a dish that makes it so.  Most of these variations are very basic–as in I have not started playing with meat-substitutes like seitan, tofu, or other meat substitutes.  That doesn’t mean I won’t tinker with the idea later on.  If you have ideas or suggestions to make a dish Vegetarian, etc., please contact me!

St. Sergius & St. Bacchus, Patrons
My blog’s patron saints are Sts. Sergius and Bacchus.  Sergius and Bacchus were third century Roman soldiers in Caesar Galerius Maximianus’s army, and were held high in his favor until they were exposed as secret Christians. They were then severely punished, with Bacchus dying during torture, and Sergius eventually beheaded. Churches in their honor have been built in several cities, including Constantinople and Rome. Their feast day is October 7.  The close friendship between Sergius and Bacchus is strongly emphasized in their hagiographies and traditions, making them one of the most famous examples of paired saints.

In his book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, John Boswell also argues that Sergius and Bacchus’s relationship can be understood as having been a romantic one, noting that the oldest text of their martyrology describes them as erastai, which can be translated as “lovers”. Boswell suggests that the two were united in a rite known as adelphopoiesis (brother-making), which he argues was a type of early Christian same-sex union, reflecting his view of tolerant early Christian attitudes toward homosexuality.