Jennifer, I want to add a little tamarind sauce to the pot for more flavor.

But Grandma, people following this recipe may not be able to find tamarind sauce,
so we have to season it in an alternative way.

Okay. I will add some just for us. The dish is already good enough for them!

All of a sudden, I looked over at Grandma Fritzie and she was throwing stuff
into the pot by the spoonful. I shouted: Wait! What are you doing?
We need to measure out the spices with measuring spoons.

OK, she said, and pulled out an old soup spoon.
I asked her: What’s that?
A tablespoon, she replied.
Grandma, what if we need a teaspoon?
Pulling out a sugar spoon she said to me: This is one teaspoon. Level.
(And to show me that she was being accurate,
she skimmed over the top of the spoon with her little finger.)

Jennifer, you should be a scientist! she said in exasperation.
It was on this very first day of cooking with my Grandma Fritzie when I realized that
extracting the exact recipe from her was going to be a very difficult task.

What led me to write, my family cookbook,
A Fistful of Lentils: Syrian-Jewish Recipes From Grandma Fritzie's Kitchen?

One day I found myself standing in my mother’s kitchen, planning a dinner party and consulting a collection of tattered Syrian family recipes recorded by my mother and aunt years before. Although many recipes had at least been scribbled down, I found that they were often incomplete, with ingredients sometimes missing, vague measurements and directions not always clear. Holding the binder in my hands, thinking about the importance of tradition and the ease with which Old World knowledge is lost, I decided to make this family cookbook project my own. So I began paying cooking visits to my Grandma Fritzie almost every weekend.

When I started this project, I concentrated mainly on obtaining the recipes themselves. My grandmother was naturally proud of me for my efforts but for her the recipes were secondary to my spending time with her. After six months of cooking alongside her, we became closer and I began to see her as more than just my grandmother and as a mother, daughter, sister, aunt, cousin and even friend. With the aroma of certain spices and the tasting of special dishes triggering memories of her childhood in Syria, her kitchen became the backdrop for telling me stories from her life’s history. Ten years later, I ended up with A Fistful of Lentils: Syrian-Jewish Recipes from Grandma Fritzie’s Kitchen (Harvard Common Press, 2002), filled with family lore and anecdotes, cultural history, my own hand-drawn illustrations, a family tree, and of course a fairly comprehensive collection of all of my family’s recipes stretching from Syria to America.

Why YOU TOO should record your family's recipes...

Traveling throughout the country giving lectures, food demonstrations and booksignings for
A Fistful of Lentils, people come up to tell me how much they have been enjoying reading about my family’s history and the personal stories that are woven throughout the book. They often begin to tell me about their own relatives, and how Aunt Gladys always made the best chili, or their grandmother Sophia was the only one who could make the deep dish apple pie flaky and moist at the same time. At least one person would say that his or her mother never wrote anything down, or always left things out when providing a recipe, implying that it would be nearly impossible for them to do a family cookbook of any sort. They just don't know where to begin!

For all of these reasons and more I felt it necessary to show others how to do just what I did for my family. I want people to know that it is possible for them to gather recipes, stories and photos and put them together in a book that will not be just a nice gift for other family members, but that will preserve all of those precious stories and memories that make up their family’s unique history and traditions as well. I also want people to get to know members of their family in the same way that I got to know my own Grandma Fritzie, an added benefit of doing one’s own family cookbook. Hardly a soul exists who doesn’t have a hardwire connection to the family kitchen of one’s past. Through comments made to me about my own cookbook-memoir, A Fistful of Lentils, it is clear that many people yearn to create and share their own personal memories of dishes cooked and stories and meals shared by their own family members. Inevitably my readers will say:

I’d love to do what you did. How do I go about it?

Now YOU TOO can write a family cookbook:
Let me help you! Click here for my family cookbook phone seminars.

Because I succeeded in writing, illustrating and publishing my own family cookbook, I have the hands-on experience to help you to begin aand complete such a project. In addition, I have the unique experience of twelve years in the book publishing world as a graphic artist and designer and know how to put a book together visually and logically from beginning to end. This gives me the credentials that other writers may not have in providing readers with important information on page layout, book printing, and overall production and design possibilities. In addition to the graphic design, I now have more than five years of culinary teaching experience (both private and public), as well as in recipe writing and development, and am constantly giving lectures in all kinds of venues around the country on the benefits of writing and preserving your family’s recipes and stories (for various book fairs, organizations and schools).

The choices allow non-cooks as well as devoted cooks to create a family project most suitable to their interests. Whether you want to create a handmade single scrapbook, a photocopied multi-copy book, a computer-generated, or professionally published book, I can help you to create your own family cookbook.

CLICK HERE TO sign up for my family cookbook seminars,
& you'll be on your way to a family cookbook!
• Recipe Gathering & Organizing
• Help Interviewing Family Members for Stories & Anecdotes
• Help Extracting Recipes From Family Members (Reluctant to Give Them to You!)
• Recipe Writing/Editing
• Recipe Testing & General Development
• Graphic Design & Illustration for Cookbook Layout

For my fees, or any other questions, please email me!

Thank you!