Just before my favorite holiday last week, I sat down with the prolific food-blogger-turned-cookbook-author Deb Perelman. The founder of the Smitten Kitchen was recently given a spot on the Forward 50 and is currently touring the U.S. to promote her new book, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook: Recipes and Wisdom from an Obsessive Home Cook. Next week, I will post more of the story about how her recipes have inspired my own culinary pursuits. But first, here is your chance to be a fly on the wall in our conversation about how she came to write and publish her delicious new book.
Etta King: I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about people in your family, or people that you have looked up to as role models.
Deb Perelman: I was very fond of my father’s mother, my grandmother—well both my grandmothers—but I was very close with her. She died when I was 13 though, but she loved to cook and she had two sisters who passed away much later than her and one of them was the great cook in the family. There are actually a lot of people on that side of the family that like to cook. The sour cream chocolate chip coffee cake on the site is from that part of the family, as is my family’s noodle kugel.
Read More: @ jwa.org
You might also like: