I've always worked at home, sometimes full time, sometimes only part time because I had a part time or full time job away from home. There's a biography of the great English cookbook writer Elizabeth David called Writing at the Kitchen Table. That would make a good title for my life, except it would have to be Writing at the Kitchen Table, Sewing at the Kitchen Table, Writing Computer Programs at the Kitchen Table, Drawing at the Kitchen Table, Eating at the Kitchen Table ... Et cetera.

In my current house, the house I plan to die in, I have the luxury of a separate workroom, and my husband has one too, but we often find ourselves back at the kitchen table, each of us encroaching a little bit on the other's space, each of us pushing the other's stuff a little out of the way. It's a peaceable, companionable way to work.

Many of the houses and apartments I've lived in have been cold, sometimes by my choice, sometimes by somebody else's. I kept the thermostat in one house set to 55° — that's Fahrenheit, not Celsius. The stove in that house was forty years old and not well made. If I had something in the oven, the whole kitchen got warm, and I hung quilts on the doors to keep the warmth in.
I had an apartment in which the landlord paid for heat and hot water while I paid for electricity and gas. He shut the heat off at night, but the hot water continued all night long. I was a nightowl then (I'm not now), so I tried working in the bathroom with the shower going. The warmth and the humidity were great, but I started getting serious neck aches from sitting on the floor, typing with my typewriter on the toilet. The only other room with water, hot water, was the kitchen. It didn't get as warm as the bathroom, but I'd fill up dishpans and buckets with hot water, then drain them and refill them when they cooled off. Plus I left the hot water running continuously in the sink over a little waterfall I'd build of dishes and glasses. Four a.m. the heat would come on again, clank, clank, clank, and by five a.m. the place was warm enough so I could dismantle my hot water heating system. Even though I was paying for the gas myself, I would add to the warmth by simmering something on the stovetop or in the oven.

In the mid-1970s, under what now seems to me the influence of the Zeitgeist but at the time felt like a novel and wholly autonomous impulse, I bought a house on a third of an acre of land with established fruit trees (one apple, one pear, one crabapple) and a hundred year old grapevine and set out to grow all my own food. I had a list of ten items I allowed myself to buy at the grocery store salt, milk, eggs, butter, olive oil, flour, cheese, sugar, dried beans, and canned tuna. But I'd cheat from time to time by changing the list, swapping chocolate in for cheese, or rice for dried beans. In truth the list was more like 25 things, but still not long. Once a year I was given the innards of an organically raised pig by people who didn't know what they were missing. Once a year I bought ham ends and bacon trimmings from Harrington's of Vermont, whose ham ends and bacon trimmings I use to this day. Once a year I bought spices and vanilla beans. Now and then I'd walk two miles down the street to a fish store on a dock in a defunct oyster bay and buy some fish. Now and then I'd buy some lamb shanks. Mostly I lived on what I grew.

I had great success with corn, cabbage, green beans, both American and Alpine strawberries, chard, mustard greens, and every kind of lettuce. I grew potatoes under mulch hay: buried treasure. My herbs were wonderful, both the annuals and the perennials. I heeded the warning to grow mint only in containers, so that it wouldn't take over the garden. I never succeeded in growing sweet peppers, but my hot peppers thrived. According to the state agricultural extension, over the course of the five years I lived there, I improved my garden soil from "loamy sand" to "sandy loam," great for carrots, radishes, turnips, rutabagas, beets, burdock, and parsnips. Like other gardeners, I was way ahead of the curve on exotic vegetables. I was eating arugula and sorrel years before they became restaurant clichés I grew mâche years before you could buy it in a sterile plastic bag at Whole Foods. I did hand to hand battle with tomato hornworms, gleefully dropping them into mason jars of running alcohol, and I waged an unequal war against cabbage moths.

I didn't can. I have never canned and never will; carelessness in canning leads straight to botulism, and botulism leads to death. I had a 17 cubic foot Hotpoint chest freezer and kept records of what went in and out; once a year I composted the mystery packages that seemed to appear in the freezer by spontaneous generation. I made refrigerator pickles and refrigerator jam. The pickles were usually excellent; the jam was usually faulty — loose or seized up or scorched — but delicious anyway. I gathered ideas for preserving food from every possible source, some of which I use even now, when the fruits and vegetables grow in someone else's garden or on someone else's farm. Plum tomatoes cook down and down and down to make the glistening, intense tomato paste Sicilians call strattu. Apples cook down and down and down to make applesauce; most people have never tasted real applesauce, applesauce made only from apples. It's a revelation to them. Zucchini grated and squeezed dry in cheesecloth à la Julia Child freezes perfectly and makes a superb gratin with cream and cheese and breadcrumbs; no one can ever figure out what it is. Organic pork liver and fat with bay leaf and black pepper make a pâté as good as any you will ever taste. The season for quinces is woefully short, so I treat quinces as I used to treat my plums, quartering and steaming them and freezing them in plastic bags.

I haven't lived alone for any long period of time since I was 17, which surprises me because I love being alone, but obviously I've preferred balancing solitude with family almost every day. My first husband was famously sociable. The first seven years of our marriage we didn't have a phone, so I learned always to cook enough to accommodate two or three guests he had invited during the day. (I invited people too, not so many and not so frequently.) During one year in which I kept track we had company to supper two nights out of every three. Some people came back often enough to be influences on my cooking, either because of their likes and dislikes or because they encouraged me to experiment and perfect dishes they ate again and again at my table. In my second marriage, we have people over every two or three weeks. Only recently have I learned that my second husband doesn't like large supper parties. I've stopped engineering them; when we have company, it's only a few people. Perhaps because we do it less often, we're more keyed up at having company, and I find myself now and then making the kinds of mistakes I avoided when I was younger — planning too many things all to be finished at the same time, cooking too many dishes or so that the meal loses its shape. It saddens me to realize how many of my kitchen failures have resulted from trying to show off. I have given only two large standing up parties in my life; when I have people over, it's to sit down at my table.

I have only one good cook in my family background, my German grandmother. She was a professional pastry baker, so she usually brought baked goods home from the bakery rather than making them at home. The memory of a particular kind of tea cookie flavored with almond extract and decorated with a swirl of bright blue sugar brings a smile to my face just from thinking about it. But it's no madeline; unlike Proust, I know how to make my memory cookie. My grandmother had a repertoire of maybe thirty dishes at most, supplemented by plain cooked vegetables with butter, salt, and pepper. But in her own right she was something of an adventurous cook. She lived in the Hill neighborhood (at that time called Wop Hill) in St. Louis and learned to make ravioli and spaghetti from her neighbors, as well as a Czech pork and apple dish from another baker at work. My grandfather kept a vast, impeccable garden in his back yard and behind that in a vacant lot. Chickens for some reason were not a success, but his rabbits went forth and multiplied. We had rabbit once or twice a week, fried, stewed, or made into soup. Grandma's family converted en masse to Catholicism when my father was twelve, and in those days Catholic means fish on Friday, canned salmon, canned tuna, canned sprats. Fresh fish appeared on the menu on the weekend, when my grandfather had time to exhibit his prowess as a fisherman.

I've been fortunate in having friends who not only fed me but explained their cooking to me. A bohemian couple in Chicago in the early 1960s had a recipe published in Gourmet magazine's contributions from readers; I still make their Alsatian sauerkraut with apples. A rather intimidating fellow in Boston who had two kitchens, one for French, the other for Chinese, introduced me to squid and taught me how to pick over blueberries. Returned Peace Corps volunteers introduced me to African foodways and taught me about yams and millet (love yams, hate millet). I exchanged leftovers and cooking tips for years with a Pakistani American family who lived next door. I learned from them about Muslim traditions, and although my family is atheist we dug up various lesser known Christian holidays and feasts so as to be able to share them. I think it's safe to say that we were the only ecumenical gathering ever to celebrate both the breaking of the Ramadan fast and Saint Denis's Day (October 9, the traditional day for making fruitcake to be consumed at Christmas). Treasured friends here in Seattle introduced me to Alice Medrich, Ina Garten, and Jamie Oliver. Is there a better gift than the name of a good cookbook author? Not to me.

Long before blogs and text messaging, there was a form of underground communication known as the chain letter. When you received a chain letter, you were supposed to add to it and send it on to five other people. Chain letters were illegal because they threatened to overwhelm the postal system with junk. (This was before the postal system was, well, overwhelmed with junk.) Thanks to friends and neighbors, I participated in many a recipe chain letter, an even better way to take the pulse of the American vernacular kitchen than compilations from church groups and day care centers.

My husband (the second one) cooks by the book and has helped me see why that's sometimes an excellent strategy. I used to get mad at him for never remembering anything I had cooked, even if it was only a week ago. Only after I started keeping a detailed food journal did I realize of course he can't remember; I can't even remember.

My sister loathes and fears cooking and yet tried for decades to find a way to cook. Conversations with her about what to cook, how to cook, when to cook, why to cook, have been more important to my thinking about living in the kitchen than a thousand exchanges with fellow enthusiasts.

My daughter started in as kitchen help when she was too short to see the top of the kitchen table, and she came to maturity as a cook long before she was a grownup in other ways. Even in the worst of our times together we've been able to talk kitchen table talk. After working as a caterer for several years, she knows things about cooking I'll never learn. She's gone from being my student in the kitchen to being my peer. The chance now to work on our website together wakes me up in the morning and puts me to bed at night. And soon my grandson will be making salad dressing and scrambled eggs (has to work a bit on the hand eye thing first).

I've been lucky to have inexpensive restaurants to patronize and learn from, Mexican in Chicago, delicatessen in Boston, pizza in New Haven, Thai in and around Palo Alto, Pakistani in Yorkshire, Algerian and Vietnamese in Paris, Italian in Italy. Eating in those restaurants and then leaving them behind and trying to recreate their dishes from memory has been a way of educating my palate. Seattle's Ethiopian and Malaysian and Korean restaurants would mark my cooking if I moved away, but I'm not moving.

It took me a long time to catch on to cooking shows on television, but lately I've been enjoying them and learning from them. Carlo Middione picked up a green bean, sliced off the stem end, looked soulfully at the other end, and said, "Why would anyone want to cut off the tail of a green bean? It's a beautiful, natural part of the bean." My prep time for beans got cut in half from that moment on. I think of Nigella Lawson every time I struggle to scrape out the last fleck of parsley or shake out the last droplet of olive oil. Would Nigella waste her time on a fleck of parsley or a droplet of olive oil? She would not. She lives lavishly. Stop winkling.

I've had a struggle with my weight for going on twenty years; I understand it's typical that I lose, then slip back into bad habits, gaining it all back and then some. I used to say I might be fat but at least it was all cream and butter and ham; these days, I'd have to say I might be fat but it's all wheat berries and soy milk and omega- 3s, which sounds pretty pitiful. I hope working on this book will help me. It's embarrassing to say oh, I cook this way and that way and look, it's ended up with me forty pounds overweight. Time will tell.
Much of what I know about cooking I've learned from books, and I hope in this book to lay open how I've done it. Jane Grigson, Marsha Colman Morton, the early days of Eating Well magazine, Mark Bittman — I eat their words, I eat them every day. The greatest influence in my current kitchen is Walter Willett's Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. I'm trying to apply his wisdom to the ideas and techniques I've learned from all those other books. (But not his recipes. Terrible recipes.)

These are the life strands that come together in my cooking. Working at home, working in the kitchen, keeping warm by the stove, gardening, being (as you will have gathered) often enough short of cash to make thrift a necessity without being truly trapped in poverty, cooking for myself and others, meals and conversations about food at other people's tables, some real travel, some armchair travel, the desire to achieve and maintain a healthy weight — these are the reasons I've grappled with the cookbooks I've used, the books that this book is about. I've read and understood their recipes and then wrenched them into the shape of my life; I hope you will too.