Photo by Danny Fulgencio

Photo by Danny Fulgencio

Photo by Danny Fulgencio

Photo by Danny Fulgencio

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Lake Highlands resident Natalie Cole and her mother, Janet Covington, love feeding other people almost as much as they love being in the kitchen together. So their joint business venture, Mr. Wittle’s Fine Foods, is perfect for them.

The Mr. Wittle’s line features pie fillings, jams, jellies, slaws, pickled and roasted vegetables, and more, all prepared in small batches by the mother-daughter team using techniques passed down for generations. “I grew up canning, taught by my mother and grandmother,” Covington says. But the recipes are all theirs. “We wanted to take classic recipes and put a modern twist on them,” Cole says. Take their coleslaw, for example: “My grandmother always canned coleslaw,” Cole says, but their Asian version is a different thing entirely, spiced with cilantro, sesame seeds and Thai pepper.

Before launching Mr. Wittle’s, Covington was a legal assistant and Cole a counselor in the mental health field. “We were good at what we did,” Covington says. “But we’ve always wanted to do something with food. This is what we love to do.” So the pair started developing new recipes and perfecting old ones. Cole says she doesn’t really have a favorite product. “We have a personal connection to each of them,” she says. “But for Mom, the pie fillings are her babies. She is the master of those.”

Cole and Covington spent nine months on recipe testing (aided by “Mr. Wittle” himself, Cole’s son, a soon-to-be second-grader at Moss Haven Elementary who tastes all their concoctions).

Then they launched their business last September. The two rent a commercial kitchen, where they spend a good deal of their workday.

“Either that or we’re in front of a computer,” Covington says with a laugh, referring to the upkeep of the company’s website, blog, Etsy store, and Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts.

“We love knowing that our food can reach people,” Cole says.

To that end, their products are available on artizone.com, a local service that delivers artisan-made foods, as well as manykitchens.com, a small-batch gourmet site based in Brooklyn. Scardello, the artisan cheese shop on Oak Lawn, recently started carrying their raspberry-jalapeño jelly. And of course they have a website, mrwittlesfinefoods.com,  where they not only sell their products but also post recipes they’ve developed using them, such as  roasted poblano corn cakes with cilantro cream sauce, apple crisp, roasted tomato crostini and even a couple of cocktails.

“Everybody’s busy,” Cole says. “People need shortcuts to great homemade food that’s delicious.”