Kitchen Yarns

In this warm collection of personal essays and recipes, best-selling author Ann Hood nourishes both our bodies and our souls.

From her Italian-American childhood through raising and feeding a growing family and cooking with her new husband, food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Growing up, she tasted love in her grandmother’s tomato sauce and dreamed of her mother’s special-occasion Fancy Lady Sandwiches. Later, the kitchen became the heart of Hood’s own home. She cooked pork roast to warm her first apartment, used two cups of dried basil for her first attempt at making pesto, taught her children how to make their favorite potatoes, found hope in her daughter’s omelet after a divorce, and fell in love again¯with both her husband and his foolproof chicken stock.

With her signature humor and tenderness, Hood details all these recipes and more in Kitchen Yarns, along with tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.

“"Written in a series of deliciously digestible essays, the wistful and wonderful Kitchen Yarns is a feast for the heart, mind, and senses."”

"These tales of ingredients, recipes, and meals will lift your spirits." -- Bethanne Patrick - The Washington Post
"Hood’s essays are like hot chocolate, cozy and warm. Her collection of meditations on food and life touches the big themes." -- Editors' Choice - The New York Times Book Review

Ann Hood is the author of more than a dozen books of memoir and fiction, including the best-selling novels The Book That Matters Most, The Red Thread, and The Knitting Circle. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York.

Praise for Ann Hood "Hood is larger than life, living, loving, and grieving on an operatic scale." - New York Times Book Review "Ann Hood is a captivating storyteller." - Lily King "I can think of no better guide than Ann Hood, whose generosity of spirit, courage, humor, gumption, and grace are a powerful reminder that language and story have the capacity to heal, to instruct, and to change our lives." - Dani Shapiro "Ann Hood's writing is an unusual combination of the delicate and the fierce." - Meg Wolitzer "Hood never for a paragraph or a page loses control over the story that suffuses her, the sound of the words, the impact of images." - Philadelphia Inquirer "Hood's words...pull you along, like a knitting pattern, one mesmerizing, settling click at a time, stitch by stitch, row by row, until you find yourself with something solid and real." - Oregonian

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