“I grew up eating chocolate mousse with a silver teaspoon.” So begins the title essay from this delightful compilation—two parts memoir, one part cookbook from Laura Zinn Fromm. An award-winning journalist and self-described sugar addict, Fromm is funny and frank in this moving account of trying to find comfort in a family fraught with mental illness.

Fromm worked for years as a reporter at Business Week, living in Manhattan and barely cooking at all. Craving a kitchen that could accommodate more than one, she returned, with her husband and two young sons, to live in the idyllic New Jersey town where she grew up. There, Fromm set about learning to cook and cope as she navigated 9/11, her father’s illness and her decision to create a grown up life in her childhood town.

These essays are warm and generous, as are her recipes and cooking advice. You’ll find everything in here, from baking for a Nobel Prize winner to courting a kidnapper; mastering a mousse soufflé to roasting a chicken in milk. Fromm writes about life with tenderness and tenacity, and about food with a devotion and sensuality that will inspire even the most kitchen-phobic among us to bolt for our sauté pans. If food is love, Fromm depicts cooking as even lovelier.