Describe your personal and/or professional background as it relates to the book. My earliest memory is of a tomato. It was a greenish-yellow chunk, offered in my grandmother’s brown hands, and sprinkled with salt that glistened alluringly in the afternoon sun. I remember the explosion in my mouth of sweet, sunny flavour as if it was a revelation. The whole scene is perfectly intact in my memory: my grandmother’s voice, the sizzling fat in a pot beside her, the smell of basil and lemon in the air. I can revive this early memory so entirely in my mind’s eye in part because I have always been a food-obsessed, ravenous glutton, but also because nearly identical kitchen scenes were the very fabric of my childhood. In our house there was always something simmering on the stove, and always someone commanding, “Taste this!” You might say I was destined to be a food writer. The women in my family cooked the way that some people breathe. They taught their six-year-olds to slice zucchini and their eight-year-olds to bake pies. They grew their own vegetables, slaughtered their own chickens, and created simple, delicious meals. No matter what crisis was unfurling in the family (and trust me, my childhood, while scrumptious, also had its fair share of drama, divorce, illness, and poverty) my mother, aunts, and grandmother all considered a solid meal the antidote to turmoil. Discuss how you came to write this book. What inspired this project, or shaped your thinking about this topic? I didn’t always appreciate my family’s food obsession, however. When I was a teenager, I decided there was something absurdly neurotic about this reliance on food as emotional balm. No one in my family discussed their emotions; they just cooked them out. Surely it was unhealthy, I thought at seventeen, that my mother’s one and only answer to sadness was to bake a peach cobbler. It wasn’t until I left for college, until I had eaten nothing but cafeteria sawdusty sandwiches and soggy spaghetti for months, on the night after my first really soul-crushing breakup, that I saw clearly what my mother had given me. Alone in my dorm room, nursing a broken heart, I was hungry — hungry for home, for comfort, for companionship, and yes, hungry for cobbler. That night, I cooked dinner in my friend’s kitchen. I can tell you exactly what I made: a roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and a spinach salad. Peaches were too expensive, so I baked oatmeal raisin cookies for dessert. Eight people came over to eat, bringing their own cutlery because my friend didn’t have enough forks. We lit candles. Someone put on Ella Fitzgerald. We talked. I remember the chicken was a little burnt. That was it — nothing monumental, nothing magical — but by the time I went to bed, I felt better: not fine, yet, exactly, but better, comforted in a way that was real and deep and familiar. Soon after that dinner, I volunteered to write the food column in my school’s paper. Because I was constantly testing out recipes for the column, there was always something simmering on the stove; and because there was always something on the stove, there were always friends milling around, tasting soup or scones, laughing and chatting and offering the sort of steady, cozy presence that creates, with people who were recently strangers, the sweetest parts of family life. Sharing food and writing about it is the best way I know to take care of people, and to let them take care of you back. Give readers a taste of what they will find later in your book. This book is a series of essays about food, which I published in various magazines and blogs between the years 2002 to 2015. It deals with questions of how to eat more sustainably and healthfully; it is also a celebration of food and the power of a good meal to make us happier, saner, more rooted in our community. What I’ve realized while editing this book, however, is that these essays are above all a love letter to my family. Although I intended this book to be about food, these essays form a record of my grandmother’s love and my mother’s strength, my sister’s wit and my aunt’s humour. These essays are also a record of the woman I have been, the places I have lived, the gardens I have planted, the people I welcomed to my kitchen table and who welcomed me to theirs. Allude to why your book matters. In this busy age, when we are all bombarded with information, it is helpful, I think, to be offered a chance to take a breath and do things simply. There is something meditative about basting a slow-roasted chicken. There is something therapeutic in watching people’s faces light up when you offer them a plate of cookies. There is something healing in the simple task of washing lettuce. Cooking and sharing what you cook — like all forms of art, like all forms of love — are a reminder of our abiding connection to one another. Mention your intended audience for this book. Whether you are a foodie, a fast-food devotee, a lonely heart nostalgic for family dinners — I hope you find something of value in these pages. This book might inspire you to cook dessert, or it might just offer you an imaginative escape from the incessant hurry of modern life. Maybe it will prompt you to call your mom. Regardless of how you use this book, I hope it helps you in some small way to build a life of greater deliciousness.