Hello from Abby 

Mad Hatter peppers?

I didn’t know that they existed until we moved to Virginia. Same for golden zucchini and sunshine squash. There’s also lavender—not dark purple, mind you—but lavender eggplant, plus carnation pink mushrooms, orange beets, and black radishes. Who needs a pot of gold when the rainbow itself is the treasure? (Well, actually…)

Anyway, the best muscle pump in town comes from lugging around half a dozen bags of vegetables at the Blacksburg Farmers Market. Pack the butternut and spaghetti squashes on the bottom, peppers and baby ginger in the middle, the little gem bibb lettuce on top.

Grab some rutabaga. (Yes, RUTABAGA—that quasi-mythical food my dad would joke about when I asked him what was for dinner). Turnips, too. Yes, get the Hakurei turnips. They’re a revelation, raw or cooked. The rutabagas, you’ll want to cook. Rose is bonkers about them. Her other favorites are green beans and lunchbox peppers. Steve’s are cherry tomatoes. Just call me Sasquash.

Have you guessed that dinner together is our favorite part of the day?

Mealtime rapture—and the delightful folks we’ve met at the market and Glade Road Growing farm share—are what inspired us to start LAFFkitchen in 2024.

We are excited to contribute to the vibrant food community that has come to mean so much to us. What we’re offering is protein. Animal-friendly protein, that is, in the form of high-quality seitan. Seitan: I must have a thing for words with problematic pronunciation and at least one s, e, and t.

As a college freshman in 1999, I walked into the natatorium at Northwestern University. I looked up at the record board. STEKETEE. STEKETEE. STEKE-what? STEKETEE was up there eight times—50 free, 100 free, 200 free, and five relays. STEKETEE. Heckuva a swimmer, but that last name…

Then I met Steve STEKETEE. Despite his diverting humor and v-shaped back, it took six months before I accepted his offer of a ride from the pool to my apartment. (Was it snowing?) We became friends and dated other people. Fast forward to June 2005. We were both swim coaches at West Virginia University. I stopped by Steve’s apartment after a day of coaching at the most humid swim meet of my life. Imagine being coated in Elmer’s glue and rolled in salt. Then you’re popped in an oven at 425 degrees for 10 hours. I was somewhere between being a mummy and being the urn buried beside the mummy. And yet—after five years—Steve made a move to kiss me. Surely, this was a delusion brought on by mummification. Surely, his face was not coming closer. Surely, surely, my mouth would not fall open in shock. And definitely, surely, that movement would not cause my upper lip to roll all the way under and stick to my desiccated gums.

But there it was—picture this on an urn—me helplessly baring my top teeth to a fast-incoming Steve Steketee.

He kissed me right in the incisors. “HOLD ON! I CAN DO BETTER!” I shouted.

And I did.

On our wedding day in Forest, Virginia, in 2006, we climbed Sharp Top, one of the Peaks of Otter that my family has been climbing for decades. Over the next 12 years, Steve and I coached together at the University of South Carolina, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Northwestern University. In 2018, we moved to the New River Valley and became Hokies. Steve is the associate head coach of Virginia Tech Swimming and Diving, and I earned my PhD from the VT Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise. We adopted Rose in 2023. She’s determined the pace of our walks ever since.