CAROLA LOVES TO COOK
A (non) friend once said about me, “Well, it’s obvious she enjoys her own cooking.” I didn’t think about it at the time, but later, I realized it was both an insult and a compliment. Like my character Carola, I love to cook and I’ve collected recipes all my adult life.
The first one in the collection was for the banana bread that was served at my wedding shower when I married my practice husband. (Fifteen years of practice—not a lot of fun, but I learned a lot and got some nice children out of the experience.)
During those fifteen years, I entered banana bread made from this recipe in the Tompkins County Fair in New York and won first place in the quick bread category. Well, my loaf was the only one entered, but still, a blue ribbon is a blue ribbon. I still have it.
So how could I not make food and recipes an important part of the lives of my characters: Anne, Jack, Carola, Ernesto, Hal, and Victor?
Carola, Anne’s housekeeper, has been an excellent cook from childhood, and she’s collected recipes from friends and family over the years. She taught Anne to cook when Anne was a bride. They’ve been cooking together for the almost forty years since. Here are some of their favorite recipes.
