"Kitchen Tales"

My intention to preserve our family’s traditional recipes has
morphed into a cookbook that includes many of my own original
dishes and over fifty years of collected favourites.

It is also a bit of a memoir, with tales of travel as well as biographies and
anecdotes about friendship and fellow food
lovers.

Enhanced with illustrations taken from my extensive pile of sketchbooks, or created especially for this book, each specifically selected recipe has a history. Try as many as you fancy – just for the fun of it!

 

Excerpt:

Do you remember your mother telling you: “Don’t play with your food?” Mine did. Furthermore, “Thousands of children are starving in India.” (Or was that China?) Food was a serious business when I was growing up. My mother and her sisters often had little to eat besides potatoes, milk if they had a cow, perhaps a little cabbage. Mom made it her business to see that she would never be wanting again. She planted a garden everywhere we lived, and crops dared not sprout nor dawdle on their way to fulfillment. It was my good fortune that my mother-in-law, Kay, excelled creativity in the kitchen. Her enthusiasm and joy in producing appetizing, eye appealing dishes was echoed by all of her daughters-in-law at that time. Preparing and serving food was not just an art, it was an act of inspired genius. She’d stand by and beam as her family and guests tucked in to delicious servings made with her generous heart and the love she put into each dish. The main thing is, as Kay taught me, enjoy the process. Those of us who prepare the meals spend a lot of our lives in the kitchen—we need to get as much joy out of it as we can. So go ahead—have some fun—play with your food