Cookbook Club: Tenderheart

Love to eat? Love to cook? Join us for a monthly cookbook feast! Each month, the group picks recipes from a single book. Each participant chooses a recipe from the book and prepares it for the group's meeting. At our meeting, we eat the dishes we've all prepared and talk about what inspired us to make them.

In January, we'll cook from Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds by Hetty Lui McKinnon.

A Bon Appetit Best Book of the Year. The acclaimed author of To Asia, With Love explores how food connects us to our loved ones and gives us the tools to make vegetarian recipes that are healthful, economical, and bursting with flavor.

Heritage and food have always been linked for Hetty Lui McKinnon. Tenderheart is a loving homage to her father, a Chinese immigrant in Australia, told in flavorful, vegetarian recipes. Growing up as part of a Chinese family in Australia, McKinnon formed a deep appreciation for her bicultural identity, and for her father, who moved to Sydney as a teenager and learned English while selling bananas at a local market. As he brought home crates full of produce after work, McKinnon learned about the beauty and versatility of fruits and vegetables. 

Tenderheart is the happy outcome of McKinnon’s love of vegetables, featuring 22 essential fruits and vegetables that become the basis for over 180 recipes.

The Cookbook Club meets in the Community Room at the South Burlington Public Library on the first Tuesday of the month. Copies of the book will be available for browsing recipes at South Burlington Public Library for a month leading up to the meeting. To attend, let us know what you plan to cook by signing up at the Circulation Desk or by emailing sbplprograms@SouthBurlingtonVT.gov.

All are welcome!