About the Author

Laurie Colwin is the author of five novels--Happy All the Time; Family Happiness; Goodbye Without Leaving; A Big Storm Knocked It Over; and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object--three collections of short stories--Passion and Affect; The Lone Pilgrim; and Another Marvelous Thing--and two collections of essays, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. Colwin died in 1992.

Reviews

"Celebrates a life devoted to food, with chapters on how to cook a meal for several hundred people, how to prepare a gourmet dinner with eggplant in your bathtub, and how to make the best fried chicken in the world." --Santa Fe New Mexican

"As much memoir as cookbook and as much about eating as cooking." --The New York Times Book Review Everything food writing should be: funny, profound, inspiring and unaffected. --Nigella Lawson "The one true kitchen friend. --The Washington Post "Laurie Colwin's food thoughts are like phone calls from a dear friend." --The New York Times "A delightful tribute to food, friends and kitchen memories.... This charmer is as irresistible as homemade shortbread." --San Diego Union-Tribune "A very funny book. Funny enough to make you giggle out loud." --Newsday

"[Laurie Colwin] is a home cook, like you and me, whose charm and lack of pretension make her wonderfully human and a welcome companion." --Chicago Tribune

"I decided to lean back and trust Ms. Colwin when she revealed that 'I am never on a diet regime I cannot be talked out of.'" --Ann Banks, The New York Times Book Review "Delightful. . . . [Colwin] is funny, and for some reason funny stories about food are as funny as things can get." --St. Petersburg Times "Cozy, unpretentious good sense . . . characterizes all her food writing." --The New York Times

"I have in my kitchen a book called Home Cooking. And, in between following the recipes for Extremely Easy Beef Stew, or Estelle Colwin Snellenberg's Potato Pancakes, I would frequently sit down on a little stool in my kitchen and read through one of the essays in that book. I never read through The Joy of Cooking, and I can read the Silver Palate Cookbook standing up, but I always sat down to read these." --Anna Quindlen "Laurie Colwin is both sensible and sensitive when writing about food, and [her] prose makes me laugh, cry and feel hungry all at the same time." --The Baltimore Sun

"Reading the essays of Laurie Colwin is a bit like eating comfort food: warm, familiar and good for the soul." --Hartford Courant

"A warm, personal remembrance of the foods Colwin ate as a child and later served to friends and family." --Seattle Post-Intelligencer "[Colwin] is a beacon of hope. For beginning cooks, Home Cooking is a grand consciousness and/or confidence-raiser." --The Oregonian

"Like a classic dish, [Colwin's] writing is magic in its simplicity." --Charlotte Observer

"Wry and funny." --Dallas Morning News

"Charming and humorous." --USA Today

"Enthralling, but all too short. The only thing to do [is] reread it. And then turn to her novels." --Buffalo News