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As you might guess from the very long acknowledgments section, Forking Fantastic! was hardly just the work of Tamara and me. Even so, I felt a bit of a twinge when I first saw the printed book and saw that I'd compressed my thanks for my parents into one sentence.

My parents taught me to eat well, and not in a fancy-gourmet way. My dad occasionally treated us to a dinner of nothing but rare steak and homemade french fries, with red wine. My mom made fresh bread. We had epic dinners when friends and family rolled into town. And all this happened a lot of the time on a food-stamp budget.

I grew up in what most people would call a hippie house, in the back of beyond in New Mexico--city kids often asked me, ‘Do you have running water? Do you hunt for your own food?' The answers were ‘yes' and ‘no,' respectively--but we did have a diet that most other people, it turned out, did not consider normal. Of course it felt perfectly normal to me--at first. It wasn't until I started going over to friends' houses in elementary school that I realized there was a whole other world of food beyond brown rice, green salads with homemade vinaigrette and that natural peanut butter you had to stir the oil into.

To my parents' chagrin, I'm sure, I was not born with what you could call a refined palate. My top pick at Baskin-Robbins was Pink Bubblegum ice cream--or it was at least once, anyway, when I finally ordered it despite my parents' disapproval. And then promptly realized I'd been conned, because the bubblegum was not even properly chewable. After that, I was a Rainbow Sherbet kind of gal, while my parents picked the best chocolate and fruit flavors.

After school, I'd high-tail it to my next-door neighbor's house, where we ate peanut-butter sandwiches made with the good kind of peanut butter on squishy white bread, and washed it all down with that strangely fluffy ice cream that came in a box. Oh, and we'd watch tons of TV--another thing that was missing at my house.

At home, I despised cilantro, wailing that it tasted like dish soap. I thought gado-gado should be called grosso-grosso--I certainly didn't appreciate that my mother was cooking an Indonesian dish in the mid-70s, and how cosmopolitan that made us. And, as I complain about in the cookbook, I had to wash the lettuce for salad every. single. night. Even when we had vegetable soup. This made no sense to me--there were already vegetables in the soup, right?  Surely that was enough?

Obviously it wasn't. My parents slowly chipped away at my resistance. By the time I was a teenager, I didn't mind cilantro so much. I'd given up milk chocolate, following my dad's repeated taunting and triumphant statements, ‘Great--more of the good dark stuff for us, then!'  And when I ate dinner at other people's houses, I wondered where the salad was.

And when I started cooking for myself, in graduate school, the first thing I made was my own vinaigrette, for a green salad. It was just the beginning of realizing the galling truth: My parents had been right all along.