Eight years ago at just about 4:15 in the afternoon, Patrick, our middle son, then 19, was killed in an automobile accident on I-20 just west of Atlanta in Douglasville, Georgia. He’d offered to drive after a concert so his two friends could sleep in the back of the Ford Explorer. But he fell asleep as well, the car rolled and it was over for him. The two kids in the back survived but he wasn’t so lucky. When Jim and I created this site we said we would write about almost anything, including food. I’ve been urged from time to time over the last eight years to write about what’s it’s like to lose a child. But I’ve never wanted to, because, frankly I was afraid; fearful of calling up good memories of Paddy Wagon only to be reminded that there would never be any others. I’m still scared but I am going to finally try, almost at exactly the same time of day that the Georgia State trouper called the house and gave the news to Michael, the youngest, mistaking a fourteen year old with a deep voice for an adult, that a Patrick Hamby had been killed in an accident.

Cooking has been getting in the way of the writing recently. And promoting the CBs, after all, is why we created this space in the first place, but communicating with the CB Nation is very important to CB Jim and I so we’ll get after the writing now starting with a few random thoughts from my fevered mind.

The Comfort Brothers had a large time on Saturday night springing a conspiratorial surprise 50th birthday party on a somewhat unsuspecting target, one Mr. Scott Oostdyk, also known as “Scottie O!” to his Princeton roomy CB Jim. I say “somewhat unsuspecting” because Scott is a lawyer, a damn good one, and when’s the last time you heard a barrister admit you pulled one off on him?

There might really be something to the connection between the food and the teams of the Super Bowl. As the game was a tale of two halves, so it was with the food. There was the consistently good, familiarly reliable versus the uncertain, upstart, new and different. The big plays went to the Saints and to my surprise and delight, it was the same with the food…