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Another person who gets short shrift in the acknowledgments of Forking Fantastic! is Barton Rouse. He was the chef at Terrace Club, the place I ate in college. That college was Princeton, and, yes, it's a world-class educational institution and I feel very lucky to have attended, but sweet Jesus, did I feel out of step in that preppie kingdom in central New Jersey.

I hailed from New Mexico (geographic affirmative action, most certainly), and had never even before set eyes on the glossy, worldly New England prep school kids, who strode around campus like royalty. (Even worse, I didn't discover until my junior year, was that half of those apparently entitled kids were actually on as much financial aid as I was.)

Terrace "Flaming" Club was the antidote. The place was refreshingly frumpy and democratic. It was a tony-sounding "eating club" like all the others that ruled Princeton's social scene, but membership was by random selection, not interview. Where other clubs had waiters, high-shine wood paneling and antiques on display in the library, we had fellow students in pink hairnets serving us food on a cafeteria line, saggy secondhand sofas and a pinball machine.

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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.

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Zora O'Neill is our guest blogger during the week of October 13. If you have any questions for Zora O'Neill, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some more information about Forking Fantastic!:

The innovative hosts of a hot-ticket underground supper club invite you to crank up your oven, break out the vino, and save the dinner party from extinction

Twice a month, two veterans of the New York food world prepare a big meal in a tiny kitchen, serving heaping plates of spectacular cuisine to twenty diverse people (or more). Friends old and new at their Sunday Night Dinners supper club make spirited conversation while feasting on sumptuous cooking. Never obsessed with perfect place settings or fussy details, Zora O'Neill and Tamara Reynolds instead focus on the practical joys of down-to-earth entertaining at home. In Forking Fantastic, they showcase their very best recipes for making mouthwatering dinners-and for having the time of your life.

With a healthy dose of irreverent attitude and infectious spirit, here Tamara and Zora take the pressure off and encourage us to reclaim the lost art of cooking delectable meals for the masses. Forking Fantastic! includes:

* foolproof, party-tested, delicious menus that are easy to master, each with a "Plan of Attack" for preparing multiple recipes without panic.
* practical tips on everything from shopping and stocking a kitchen to making creative vegetarian substitutions and trussing a whole lamb for spit-roasting
* hard-won advice from the trenches and an inside look at Tamara and Zora's own cooking disasters

Food-forward but always realistic, Tamara and Zora celebrate seasonal, local ingredients while also extolling cornbread mix and the frozen pea. Quirky, funny and fresh, this book arms intimidated cooks everywhere with the courage, confidence and tools they need to have people over for the sake of food and community, not for the prize of being the best hostess on the block. A manifesto for bringing back a time-honored ritual one mind-blowing feast at a time, Forking Fantastic! makes dinner parties rock.