By Theresa Curry Correspondent At work, LaVerne Andrews oversees the production of food that's pretty predictable: wraps and salads, gyros, chicken tenders, hamburgers. She's a supervisor in the food court at Old Dominion University, monitoring a section of the huge dining area devoted to meals for students and teachers.

By Theresa Curry Correspondent Some household cooks are inspired by what looks good in the store or market; others head out with a recipe in mind. Still others plan ahead for several weeks of meals, buying ingredients in bulk in one giant shopping trip.

By Theresa  Curry

Correspondent

Nursery food was not on the menu at the Bickford home when Jim Bickford  was growing up in the Stockley Gardens  neighborhood of Norfolk. He dined on sweetbreads and duck, oysters in season, crab and fresh vegetables.

By Theresa Curry Correspondent He’s traveled everywhere and noticed everything. Barry Drude moved up and down the East Coast as a child with his Navy family. He settled in Louisiana as a college student, lived off and on in Virginia Beach, was stationed in Florida and Georgia, was sent to military trouble spots and worked for Boeing in rural England.

By Theresa Curry Correspondent WHEN DELORES CARTER was growing up in Hampton, there was a lot of food on her family's table on Sundays. With five sisters and five brothers, she didn't lack for company. Even as a very young child, she had a hand in Sunday dinner.

By Theresa Curry Correspondent

As often is the case with a diagnosis, good and bad came with Will Wyndham’s discovery he had celiac disease. 

Thankfully, the 29-year-old Norfolk man stopped feeling crampy and sick all the time once he cut wheat, rye and barley from his diet. People with the digestive disorder can’t tolerate a protein called gluten, which is found in those grains.  

By Theresa Curry Correspondent When John Herochik cooks, he thinks of his mother, Helen  Kustura, the oldest of 12 children growing up in New Jersey during the Depression. Helen, the daughter of Russian immigrants, lived with her family in a two-bedroom house, known locally as the home with the last working outhouse in Perth Amboy. 

By Theresa Curry Correspondent He became a home chef for all the best reasons, said Sherrie Lindsey of her husband, Wayne: He loves to cook good food and watch his family enjoy it. "Now all men can throw a steak on the grill," she said, "but my guy whips up some beautiful vegetable soups with different stocks."

By Theresa Curry Correspondent Paula Fleming grew up on a small island in a big sea, surrounded by the warm Caribbean. St. Thomas, one of the Virgin Islands, has about a tenth of the population of Virginia Beach, the city Fleming now calls home. One of her earliest memories is of her mother frying banana fritters, the smell of cinnamon and butter filling the kitchen.