num_pages: 400
description: A woman honors her father's legacy by teaching a cooking class in a home for youth in state care--a powerful memoir about the small acts of showing up that transform our lives and how making food can make community.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 unexpectedly after a brief illness Liz decided to attempt the cooking project without him. She didn't know what to expect 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.An intimate account of humorous and heartbreaking conversations and a vivid account of the clumsy choreography of cooking with other people Home Made is a sharply observed and honestly told story about how a kitchen can be both safe and dangerous; how even the short journey from kitchen to table can be perilous. Each chapter explores the interconnectedness of flavor memory culture and life and offers a glimpse into the ways we behave when we are hungry and the food we crave when we seek comfort. Home Made is a tender and vivid portrait of poverty and abundance vulnerability and strength estrangement and connection. It is a memoir about the radical grace we discover when we consider ourselves bound together in community and a piercing investigation of the essential question: Who are we to each other?
language: English
title: Home Made: A Story of Grief, Groceries, Showing Up--and What We Make When We Make Dinner
publisher: The Dial Press