Why I'm writing a cookbook about my mother

A hello, a why, and a free Cannelloni Teaser coming in January.

My mother stopped cooking.

Not all at once — slowly, over a few years. She’d been the holiday cook for thirty-odd years. The cannelloni on Christmas Eve. The lamb at Easter. The Wellington in years when the oven cooperated — and a year when it didn’t. The holidays in our house were hers.

When she eventually stepped back, my siblings and I realized we’d inherited a list of recipes that mostly didn’t exist on paper. There was a card here and there. Stained, somewhat legible. Dishes she’d made for decades didn’t have directions; they were automatic, muscle memory. When we asked her how, the answers we got were “I don’t know” and “I forget.”

So we figured it out ourselves.

The cannelloni took four Christmases. The turkey took a disaster. The Wellington took a shattered glass dish on the kitchen floor. (That story is coming soon.)

What came out of it is a cookbook called Slay the Holiday — a book about taking over a kitchen you only visit, honoring what came before, and making it your own. It launches Mother’s Day 2027.

This newsletter — Your Kitchen — is where I’m building it in public.

What you’ll find here:

• Recipes as we actually make them now (some ridiculous, some surprising, all honest)

• Stories from the chapters — including the Wellington that came out ice-cold, the year Mom was taken by aliens, and the time a whole pig showed up in our driveway

• Famous Failures (the pumpkin pie with no sugar, the turkey nobody got sick from)

• Behind-the-scenes on designing the book itself

Coming soon:
A free Cannelloni Teaser — a mini-zine covering the first chapter of the book — will go out to subscribers in January 2027. Just in time to talk about everyone’s holiday disasters.

If you have a recipe that lives only in someone’s head—or a reinvention story about a dish you had to rebuild—reply and tell me. I read everything.

Welcome in.

— Juliana