INGOMAR, Miss. (AP) - If you work in Jeff Reeder’s office at Ashley in Ecru, you’re going to get a homemade cake for your birthday.
“I have everybody’s birthday written down - I probably do about 15 a year,” said Reeder, regional transportation manager. “We’re down there to do business, absolutely, but if you don’t have something to look forward to, you get stagnant. It gives people a boost when you acknowledge their birthdays.”
Reeder, who drove a truck for Ashley for 16 years, was raised in the Cherry Creek community and finished school at North Pontotoc. He is the third of four children born to the late Harold and Ann Foster Reeder.
“My mother was an excellent cook and I spent a lot of time with her in the kitchen,” he said. “She cooked anything anybody wanted whenever they wanted it.”
In 1993, when Reeder was 28, his mother was killed in a car accident.
“After a tragic death, once you get over the shock, you start remembering things, remembering what everything she made tasted like,” he said. “I wanted to imitate her taste. I guess I’m trying to imitate my mother’s cooking. I’m not trying to bring her back to life - just keep her memory alive through her food.”
After his mother’s death, one of his brothers put together a cookbook of Ann Reeder’s recipes and gave a copy to each of the siblings.
“Most of Mother’s recipes were scratch and double-boiler kind of stuff,” said Reeder, 52. “I wanted to get into that. Desserts is where she really shined and where I want to shine.”
The first thing he made from the cookbook was her Red Velvet Cake.
“That one and my Tuxedo Cake are my two most popular, but the Tuxedo Cake wasn’t my mother’s,” he said. “The key to a lot of Mother’s recipes was in folding.”
Reeder and his wife, Vickie, have two sons and one granddaughter, Hadley, who is 3. He cooks supper for his family four or five times a week, but he prefers to make desserts.
“But I don’t like to eat them,” he said. “There’s one or two cakes or pies that I eat - Fresh Apple Cake and apple pie and fried pies and pound cake. I also make a lot of cookies, but I don’t eat them.”
When he was driving for Ashley, Reeder said cooking was a way to de-stress.
“When you’re a truck driver, you have to have some kind of release,” he said. “I enjoy it. I usually make a cake or cookies or a pie three times a week. We’ll be sitting here and there won’t be anything on TV and I’ll get up and go look in the cabinet and find something to fix. It’s what I love to do.”
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Information from: Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, https://djournal.com
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