Teaching and cooking with love

Annie McDaniel loved her kindergarten teacher so much, she wanted to be a teacher herself someday.

However, McDaniel married just after she graduated from high school, had her first of three daughters by the time she was 19 and never attended college.

“Honestly, nobody in my family went to college — they were mommas who stayed at home,” McDaniel said.

She and her husband worked at Hargis Christian Retreat on weekends, and when an opportunity to teach field trip groups came along, she jumped at the chance.

While there, she met a certified teacher and the two of them decided to start doing in-school field trips. They did that together for a year before her friend moved away. Then, her husband encouraged her to continue doing it on her own.

Her project took off, and now Miss Annie has been a fixture in elementary school classrooms for the past 25 years.

She teaches science-based programs where she dresses up in costumes and presents hands-on learning opportunities to elementary students.

“I’m in 35 different schools in eight to 10 different school systems, including all the Shelby County schools,” McDaniel said. “It moved to full-time about 15 years ago, and I am at a different school every day. I probably teach about 20,000 kids a year.”

She bakes every night and always brings a treat to the teachers when she comes to their classrooms. She appreciates what they do and loves to bring them something (usually her famous pumpkin bread) for them to enjoy while she is working with the students.

McDaniel said it’s just such a cool job and that God provided her a way to use her gift of teaching and to love kids.

“It’s such an amazing blessing to me. It’s so cool I get to be Miss Annie,” she said. “God knew I wanted to teach, and the traditional way didn’t work out for me, but this has been even better.”

She knows at some point she will transition from being Miss Annie at school to her new venture — Miss Annie Home + Kitchen — but it will be in God’s timing, she said.

Through her love of cooking, she began sharing recipes on Facebook and her YouTube channel in October. She began helping out her friend, Sue Garrett of “Mama Sue’s Southern Kitchen,’’ while she was undergoing her cancer treatment.

“I started working for her helping her ship out her cookbooks,” McDaniel said. “I asked her if I could help and did a few videos last year. She said I could consider doing this, too, and encouraged me to make my own videos and create a cookbook.”

Her first cookbook, “A Collection of Family Favorites – Volume 1” was recently released and sold out in two days. McDaniel said she made the cookbook she’s always wanted and it’s full of her favorite things.

“Every recipe I love,” she said. “It includes the recipe for my famous pumpkin bread, my grandmother’s fudge and my mom’s apple pie. It also includes a few of Mama Sue’s recipes.”

She has plans to publish a second cookbook in the fall that includes recipes for holiday celebrations.

McDaniel said she lives by two mottos. “You can do hard things” came to her after her husband, Daryl, had a massive stroke eight years ago. It was during the journey of his recovery and rehabilitation that she repeated those words to herself. She wrote them on sticky notes and put them in places she would see them every day to encourage her to keep going.

Her other motto is “Stronger every day.” When Daryl completed his time at Lakeshore Rehab, his nurse hugged McDaniel and whispered those words in her ear. They stuck with her.

“I started selling T-shirts a couple years ago [with these mottos on them],” she said. “Probably thousands of shirts people have bought, one, because it resonates with them. God knew how far that message was gonna go. I can be an instrument in his hands sharing that message that we all can do, and are doing, hard things.”

When she isn’t teaching in a school or in her kitchen, McDaniel is also a certified life coach, a mom of three daughters and a grandmother of nine. She prioritizes her health by exercising daily and loves spending time with her family.

“I’m willing to take the next right step,” she said. “I can’t be Miss Annie forever, but I feel like Miss Annie’s Home + Kitchen is the place I’m being led.”

For more information, visit missannieshomeandkitchen.com and to order a cookbook, visit missannieshomeandkitchen.com/cookbook.