writing

Q & A with Jael McHenry, Author of ‘The Kitchen Daughter’

August 30, 2011

UPDATE: And…the winner of The Kitchen Daughter is CARMEN. Congratulations Carmen! The winner was chosen at random, which is to say I wrote everyone’s name on little pieces of paper, folded them, shuffled them, and put them in a baseball cap. My daughter stuck her hand in and pulled out Carmen’s name. Thanks to everyone [...]

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A Fund for Jennie

August 23, 2011

Two and a half weeks ago—actually, on Sunday, August 7—I was in Hawaii with my family celebrating the wedding of my brothers-in-law. I had no idea that thousands of miles away in New York, my friend Jennifer Perillo’s world was falling apart. Her husband, Mikey, father to their two beautiful daughters, died suddenly of a [...]

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Looking for Inspiration? Open Your Eyes…and Get to Work

February 21, 2011

Why on earth did I decide to write a book about pasta? Why pick such a well-trodden subject? Or, to put the question in more general terms, how do you take a subject that has been written about–a lot–and make it new? I considered this question recently in an essay I wrote for WORDS, the [...]

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Chocolate Hearts and a Cookbook Appreciation

February 11, 2011

Eight or nine years ago I took a cookbook writing class at L’Academie de Cuisine, in Bethesda. I don’t know what prompted me to sign up for it; I never imagined I would be writing a cookbook. Writing cookbooks was for people like Julia Child and Jacques Pepin and Marcella Hazan; certainly not for a [...]

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