Big Food Big Love

Filled with heartwarming and personal stories, Heather Earnhardt expresses pride in her Southern roots through Big Food Big Love. Her recipes and witty stories are a celebration of Southern hospitality, local ingredients, and good cooking. —Chef Emeril Lagasse   Heather calls her Southern-inflected food messy and loud. Try cooking a meal out of the book—from a platter of crispy hush puppies fried in a cast-iron skillet to a towering layer cake oozing with coconut frosting—and then squeeze everyone you care for around your table. Boisterous conversation, laughter, and memory-making festivities will ensue. Big Food Big Love indeed. —Tom Douglas, Chef/Restaurateur   Big Food Big Love is more than a cookbook—Heather Earnhardt takes us on a journey into a way of life, featuring soulful recipes from The Wandering Goose matched with utterly delectable photos and interwoven with stories of people, places, and growing up in the South. Reading it makes me want to be in her world, live it, and cook every recipe in it, from simple biscuits and all the variations to classic American condiment staples—and of course the fantastic Brownstone Front Cake. —Pichet Ong, chef consultant and author of The Sweet Spot I’ve been lucky enough to know Heather from our early restaurant days in Seattle, and from day one her warmth impressed me. The Wandering Goose truly shines with hospitality and big, bold flavors, and the recipes are so approachable and delicious. Heather’s book is playful, soulful, and generous—just like her! —John Sundstrom, chef/owner of Lark Heather serves food with the same affection and generosity she gives to writing about people, like her indefatigable Carolina grandmother who first lured her into the kitchen. With these recipes, I may at last begin to make biscuits as tender crumbed, collards as savory, and grits as creamy as the ones I’ve long enjoyed at The Wandering Goose.  —Sara Dickerman, author of Bon Appétit: The Food Lover’s Cleanse and Dried and True As an Alaskan boy with Southern roots, Heather’s food speaks to my DNA. This book makes me yearn for sweet humid air, cold tea, crispy fried chicken, a soft buttermilk biscuit, and a warm embrace from any one of one hundred cousins. Big Food Big Love is right. It’s hard for a yankee to put a finger on what makes something or someone quintessentially Southern; Heather’s food and writing immerses you in it.  —Brendan McGrill, chef/owner of Hitchcock Restaurant Group