Meet-the-Author Recording with Jillian Tamaki
Our Little Kitchen |
Jillian Tamaki introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating Our Little Kitchen.
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Jillian Tamaki: Hi, my name is Jillian Tamaki and I'm the author of Our Little Kitchen, and I also drew the pictures. The book is about a group of people gathering to make a weekly meal for their neighbors. And it follows the process of arriving at the kitchen one-by-one, and looking around the garden, and the fridge, checking to see what's left over, what's been delivered, what the baker donated. And then making a plan about the meal, delegating the tasks, getting down to cooking, finally cooking together, the chaos of that, pulling it together at the last moment, and finally sitting down and eating with all the neighbors that have congregated.
The book was inspired by a volunteering stint that I did several years ago in a food program in Brooklyn, New York. I currently volunteer at Adult Literacy here in Toronto. And when I first showed up, they didn't even acknowledge me. It was just, "Okay, you're here. Go cut those onions. Go chop those potatoes. Whatever." Because it's just a very, very busy environment and you're just thrown into the deep end. But I kept on showing up week after week and eventually I was part of the team. And I think that that's what the book is about, too, is working in a team which can be great. And it's also a balancing act, because everybody has their own ideas as to what is the best way to go about things. But in the end, when you work together to put your skills together and your work together, you can really create beautiful things.
And now I'm going to read a short passage from Our Little Kitchen.
Tie on your apron. Roll up your sleeves. Pans are out. Oven is hot. The kitchen's all ready. Where do we start? Well, let's look around and see what we've got. We've got what we've grown, what we've kept, been given and bought. All we need is around us. We just need to look.
See how our little garden has grown? Remember how we pushed seeds into soil, one by one? Tomatoes are ripe. I'll pick a few. Look at these zuccs, let's use them up too. These carrots though, still so very small. The lettuce is holey, bugs ate it through. I found some carrots, just a week or two old. Half of the celery, 10 radishes. Oh, don't know what this is, but it's got to go. The bakery brought us some day-old loaves, a minute in the oven, maybe two? Ah, soft and warm, good as new. Three bags of apples, some of them bruised, cut off the brown bits, they're still good to use. A few sticks of butter, cinnamon, sugar, oats from the cupboard, a sweet apple crumble.
This Meet-the-Author Recording with Jillian Tamaki was exclusively created in July 2020 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Abrams.