Cooking and Screaming
Finding My Own Recipe for Recovery
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An inspiring, recipe-filled memoir about loss, recovery, and finding oneself through food and cooking.
"I rose from my wheelchair slowly, using the arms of the seat to steady myself; I managed to lift my weighty limbs and limp the three steps to the counter. Stirring left-handed, I did not want to leave the warmth of the kitchen. I felt good. And for a moment I forgot about the life that I was living. Being in the kitchen, the sights and smells, the smear of crimson tomato sauce on my borrowed apron, felt like a bit of home, a place that felt so far away."
Adrienne Kane always loved food. Waiting by the oven for the sweet, crisp cookies she baked with her mother to emerge. Learning to create a simple yet delicious frittata with her best friend. Fueling long hours of work on her senior thesis with a satisfying tagliatelle.
But just two weeks before her college graduation, Adrienne suffered a hemorrhagic stroke that left her paralyzed on the entire right side of her body. Once a dancer and aspiring teacher, she was now dependent on her loved ones, embarrassed by her disability, and facing an identity crisis. The next several years were a blur of doctors, therapists, rehabilitation, and frustration.
Until she got back in the kitchen.
It started with a stir. A stir and a taste. A little more salt. Maybe a side of crisp, sautéed potatoes. She learned to wield a chef's knife with her left hand, and to brace vegetables with her right. As she slowly stumbled from her quiet resting place at the kitchen table to where her mother stood by the stove, food became not only her sustenance and her solace, it became Adrienne's calling.
She tested new recipes and created her own, crafting beautiful, delectable feasts for the people who had nurtured her -- her mother and father, who himself had survived a stroke several years earlier; the friends who encouraged her to write a cookbook; and, of course, the boyfriend-turned-husband who stood beside her all the way. Eventually, through determination, hard work, and a healthy portion of courage, she turned her culinary love into a career as a caterer, food writer, photographer, and recipe developer.
Filled with simple, tempting recipes and complex, hard-won lessons, Cooking and Screaming is Adrienne's moving and heartfelt story of food, loss, work, and joy...and finding her identity through the most unlikely combination of ingredients.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Not many 21-year-olds expect to have a stroke while walking down the street of their college town, but that's what happened to Kane, food writer and blogger of nosheteria.com. What started off as a casual stroll resulted in weeks of unconsciousness, months of rehabilitation in the hospital and years of daily therapeutic exercises, all due to an arteriovenous malformation (commonly known as an AVM), which initially left her completely paralyzed on her right side. Drawing strength from her love for cooking, Kane started to make physical and emotional progress by relearning how to chop vegetables by using her immobile right hand as a weight. As she struggled to rebuild her life "post AVM... often fraught with anxieties and self-imposed rules," she followed her passion for food by starting a successful catering business. Kane nicely integrates memories of her childhood, family portraits (including details about her own father's stroke 13 years earlier) as well as many wonderful recipes into this story of recovery.