In this heart-warming memoir cookbook, Jeanine Roche Calabria's culinary curiosity and love of creating memorable family gatherings draw her into exploring her French and Swedish heritage through food, allowing her to understand her upbringing from a different perspective-even as it leads her away from her Hoosier roots. From learning how to skin a rabbit at the family farm in Provence to producing 1000 pastry swans for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to a disastrous public birthday celebration, Jeanine delivers fearless, tender, and often funny forays into cooking with almost anyone at her table...
As she marries, starts a family, and moves across the country, Jeanine uses food experiences to celebrate, break the monotony of making nightly family dinners, and deal with the shock of delivering a child with a disability. Universal themes of love, hope, disappointment, and forgiveness emerge in her stories with uplifting drops of wisdom that make you want to cook alongside the author.
She discovers a sure-fire way to honor family and friends--embrace their culinary traditions (using authentically sourced ingredients, of course) which becomes tricky as she tries to unravel her husband's family's Ecuadorian-Italian unspoken and often unwritten cooking rules. The result is a diverse set of recipes for almost any occasion from transforming a humble banana box cake into a whip-cream topped confection to the secret ingredients to produce a tasty brisket to colorful Calabria antipasti or a healthy, end-of-summer garden soup-using fresh ingredients or the frost-covered packages in your freezer. With engaging prose, Jeanine evokes the nostalgia of life lessons learned in the kitchen, passed from generation to generation.
Jeanine's generous culinary spirit makes it almost inevitable that she's drawn to tackling food insecurity, going from volunteer cook to executive director of Open Table, a food relief organization. Inside you'll find a recipe for glazed Santa Fe meatloaf that will serve 8-or 100 people. Don't be surprised if this cookbook makes you want to cook for a bunch of folks you love. A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to food relief programs.