A tender and vivid memoir about the radical grace we discover when we
consider ourselves bound together in community, and a moving account of
one woman’s attempt to answer the essential question Who are we to one another?
“Liz
Hauck reveals fascinating, sobering, and urgent truths about boyhood,
inequality, and the power and promise of community.”—Piper Kerman, New York Times bestselling author of Orange Is the New Black
Liz
Hauck and her dad had a plan to start a weekly cooking program in a
residential home for teenage boys in state care, which was run by the
human services agency he co-directed. When her father died before they
had a chance to get the project started, Liz decided she would try it
without him. She didn’t know what to expect from volunteering with
court-involved youth, but as a high school teacher she knew that
teenagers are drawn to food-related activities, and as a daughter, she
believed that if she and the kids made even a single dinner together she
could check one box off of her father’s long, unfinished to-do list.
This is the story of what happened around the table, and how one dinner
became one hundred dinners.
“The kids picked the menus, I bought
the groceries,” Liz writes, “and we cooked and ate dinner together for
two hours a week for nearly three years. Sometimes improvisation in
kitchens is disastrous. But sometimes, a combination of elements
produces something spectacularly unexpected. I think that’s why, when we
don’t know what else to do, we feed our neighbors.”
Capturing
the clumsy choreography of cooking with other people, this is a sharply
observed story about the ways we behave when we are hungry and the
conversations that happen at the intersections of flavor and memory,
vulnerability and strength, grief and connection.
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