This book is an herbal collection of heirloom recipes, and folklore. Generally when one thinks of comfort, satisfaction, giving and fulfillment, their mind and belly head to the kitchen.

What better place to show that love and gratitude for your family and the bounty of the garden than in your very own kitchen? This appreciation comes in many different forms: pies, cakes, salads, soups and the list could go on for days. But, the underlying love from the hands that tended the garden, harvested and preserved the food, and knowingly prepared each dish, that love is the secret ingredient that gives the most flavor.

This cookbook is just that. It is a collection of farm to table recipes collected over generational decades from the amazing women in my family.

My sweet mother; Mickey, my grandmothers; Edna and Villa, plus other dear family members, and yours truly. Each recipe contains our own unique thumbprint of creativity, inspiration, ancestral wisdom, but above all else, love.

May you develop and add your own touch of love to these family entrusted recipes, to bring gratitude, thanksgiving and memories to your own family. To this very day, some fifty plus years later, I can still smell the content that was once contained in my Grandma Edna's spice cupboard.

I can picture her small frame standing at her kitchen sink, tirelessly canning her special Christmas beets. Or my mother carefully stirring and keeping watch over a bubbling kettle of her spaghetti sauce, transforming our small kitchen into a fine Italian restaurant.

More often than not, it is food that transports us back in time to a simpler day. .

. A Simpler Thyme in the Kitchen.

Herbal Blessings!. .