The Valentine Family and Friends Cookbook ONLINE!!!!

A new venture has begun! I've started another blog devoted exclusively to food. Below is the first entry in that blog and I hope you will find time to visit it and enjoy. The URL will eventually be www.ValentineCookbook.com but for now it can be found at: www.ValentineCookbook.blogspot.com

In 1981 I was living in Houston, Texas and was dead broke. I was flying home to Pennsylvania for Christmas and wanted to take gifts but I had no money. For years I had collected recipes from my mother, two grandmothers and many aunts, cousins, siblings and friends. So, I pulled them all together and made a cookbook. It was a great hit with my family. My mother began photocopying the book and selling them for $3. She sold hundreds of them! A cooking columnist for the Erie Daily Times named Fran Fry got a copy of it and wrote not one but three columns about the book. He even drove down to St. Marys, PA, where my folks lived and spent a day with my mother sampling her cooking.

In 1992, then living in Marblehead, Massachusetts, I revised the cookbook and added lots more recipes. Again people loved it and I have no idea how many were copied and passed out. Over the past 15 years or so I’ve thought about revising the cookbook yet again but so far I haven’t.

When I began writing and publishing fiction one of the first things people said to me was my writing is very evocative and filled with sounds, smells, tastes, textures. They said my writing was very sensuous. When My Last Romance and other passions was first published a lot of people commented on the lushness of description, including the food. Now that my novel, The Old Mermaid’s Tale is also out, I am hearing more about that. A good part of the action takes place in a diner and there is food — lots of food.

I grew up around people who cooked — really cooked. They planted gardens and canned vegetables. They made bread and home-made pickles and preserves. Food was a big part of life — good food, nourishing, wholesome, delicious food, often fresh from the garden. The chapters in The Old Mermaid’s Tale when Clair works in the kitchen with her mother, where their most intimate talks take place, are straight from my own life. My mother and I had our best conversations while peeling peaches and canning garden fresh corn.

I write a literary blog at www.KathleenValentine.com. And, though I write about art and books and philosophy and knitting and whatever wanders through my mind, I get the most comments and emails when I write about food. I wrote a two part blog on my Gram Werner’s home-made Soltz and another on Sauerkraut and they still get hits everyday. So, I decided to start this blog. I plan to gradually add the recipes from my original Valentine Family & Friends Cookbook. Maybe it will eventually turn into an entire cookbook. Maybe I’ll get to tell a few stories about the memories associated with certain foods.

My family taught me a deep and abiding love for two things — books and good, wholesome food. Both my parents were avid readers and so I became a writer. Both my parents were good, down-home cooks. And so this blog.I hope you’ll try a recipe or two. And I hope you will find, as my Gram Werner would say, “Das Schmecht Gut!”

Thanks for reading!