If you visit the Landswicks for dinner during the holidays, you can find Hannah Landswick putting up Christmas decorations in her grandma’s house as her brother and grandma make dinner. Landswick’s favorite part? Her grandma’s dinner rolls. 

The recipe comes from a Shuler’s cookbook Landswick’s grandma received from her own mother in 1951. Shuler’s is a well-known restaurant in Michigan that has been around for more than 100 years. The dinner rolls recipe has been a Christmas tradition in the Landswick family for three generations now. 

She didn’t know about the history of the dinner rolls until she talked to her mom about it recently. “It’s crazy,” she says. “It’s something that’s always been there and randomly, I’ll ask about it and there’s actually a story behind it.” 

“I mean, you can’t really go wrong. It’s dinner rolls, and it’s always been something that is very comforting,” she says. She dips the rolls in gravy and mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving. During Christmas time, she’ll eat them with the brisket they serve every year. 

Now in Eugene, Landswick is searching for food to remind her of home. There’s a deli in Studio City, called Art’s, that she and her family have been going to her whole life. It’s where she had her first bagel and spent time with her family growing up. 

“Traditional sit-down meals are where I’ve been able to spend the most time with my family,” she says. And even though her grandma only lives fifteen minutes away from where she grew up, “life gets so busy, so it’s definitely nice to have those sit-down holiday or birthday meals.” 

Today, she is more than 800 miles away from her home and family, but she’s staying connected. Calls with her parents and grandma hold her over between her visits with family.  

She remembers earlier this year, when her family sent cookies from one of her favorite bakeries for Valentine’s Day.  

“It’s definitely nice to have grown up in an area where the food culture is so diverse,” she says. “So, being able to have them send me little bits of back home — it’s nice.” 

Erika Balbuena’s parents brought her packets for making atole — a hot masa drink — during a visit. But she’d never made the drink on her own before. So, one Sunday morning, with her friends and roommates, she recreated the morning gatherings she’s had with her family. They made atole together, and Erika introduced her friends to something they’d never tried before.

“Lately, I have been feeling really disconnected from home and been missing it,” she says. “(That Sunday) helped me feel a lot better.”

Raised in Joliet, Illinois, Erika Balbuena has struggled to access the food she was accustomed to back home after coming to Eugene for college. Now in her sophomore year, she makes an effort to recreate the dishes she grew up on in a new environment — and share them with her newfound community.

Freshman year didn’t provide many opportunities for connecting to home with food — especially without a reliable means of transportation or a kitchen of her own. Now, Balbuena is challenging herself to start cooking some of the dishes she loves.  

Her mom shared her classic rice recipe that she’s been using as a base for many of her meals. She’s been bringing her roommates who don’t share her Hispanic culture in on the adventure of cooking new meals together and sharing the food.

“I am not a cook whatsoever, so there’s been some trials and some triumphs,” Balbuena says. Her next goal in the kitchen is to make chilaquiles — she was missing the specific brand of tortilla chips that she eats at home, so her parents brought her some when she moved in earlier in the fall.

Having her own car has been another important resource in accessing familiar food. She’s made an effort to track down local panaderias, and trying out the bolillos and other pastries. She often visits with her roommates. She doesn’t have a favorite spot yet, she says, as each location has a specialty of its own.

“And there’s still other ones that I have yet to hit,” Balbuena says, “but it’s also really surprising to see how many there actually were.”

In addition to being able to drive to find ingredients and get baked goods, she also has an easier time cooking in her own kitchen and having all of the tools she needs for her food.

Another goal while she’s here in Eugene is making tamales. The Balbuena family is close-knit and large, so they would always meet up for birthdays, holidays, and just regular family gatherings. They would gather around the kitchen or dining table, cooking, eating, and talking together.

“You would all be around each other for an extended period of time where you can really talk,” she says about the process of preparing tamales. Recently, her uncle got engaged and the family was excited to have his fiancé join in on the tamale-making for their first time.

“Just like most people believe, food brings people together,” she says, “and I just think that was the same for my family.” 

Elin England remembers when the local eating movement swept Lane County in the early 2000s. The concept wasn’t new to her and her husband. They had nearly nine acres of farmland where they grew everything from walnuts to table grapes.  

“When you have a garden, you’re necessarily trying to eat local because you’re trying to eat everything that is coming out of the garden,” she says.

So, when a study showed it was entirely possible for Lane County to feed itself, Elin knew what it might involve. Someone, she recalls saying, would need to write a cookbook about how to cook with seasonal vegetables.  

“And I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I should write a cookbook,’” she says. In fact, she wrote two, filling them with recipes about how to cook with the resources in the Pacific Northwest. She called them “Eating Close to Home: A Guide to Local Seasonal Sustenance in the Pacific Northwest” and “Beans, Grains, Nuts and Seeds: Further Adventures in Eating Close to Home.”

For England, home has been a number of places over the years. Born in New Hampshire, she spent much of her early childhood on the East Coast before moving to California because of her father’s job. But love of food remained a mainstay in her family.

Her mother and grandmother loved to cook. Her family would often spend time during one meal planning the next or reminiscing about past ones, England says. And although their move to the West Coast made it difficult to connect with family for Thanksgiving the way they had in the past, her mom made sure they were never alone.

Exchange students would often come stay with them over the holiday. England recalls a student from China teaching her mother to cook Chinese food, and a young woman from France who ate everything — including roasted chicken legs— with a fork and knife.  

The family tradition of experimenting in the kitchen carried on into her adulthood, as England was raising her own children.

She developed her chicken pot pie recipe when her kids were young. “Rolled crust was more than I wanted to deal with,” England says. It was one of her children’s favorite dishes.

In cooking and farming alike, she’s constantly learning — and part of that process is making mistakes, she says.  

“It shouldn’t be about making it perfect,” she explains. “I want people to feel like they can experiment and that if it doesn’t come out good, it’s okay, because that’s how you learn.”