Battista - Food Gift Love: More than 100 Recipes to Make, Wrap, and Share

My mother is naturally gifted. She can scout out a fresh batch of candied orange rinds anywhere in my home. She can start a party in the drollest of rooms with a wink or a nod. She remembers every single birthday and prompts me to send thank-you notes. And she is the consummate gifter.

An exotically beautiful woman from Central America, my mother fell for an American boy and was determined to be the exemplary American housewife. She was a mother to her two daughters but also a caretaker to her brothers three children for many years. She was quite happy focused on domestic life and found joy in figuring out how to perfect the minute steak and string bean plate every housewife of that era had to master, crossing it off some implicit checklist.

Ever my biggest fan, my mother urged me to do well in school; to begin working as soon as I could (at age 14); to go to a good college, get a good job, and make a good living (whatever good meant); to wait as long as possible before walking down a wedding aisle; and to, eventually, do everything she never could.

While still working a technology career, I began to build a professional life in food, and during my figuring-things-out phase, I realized her influence from random significant moments in my childhood.

I remembered that my mom became a honeybee on the weekends, attracting everyone to our cozy house. When she convened with her extended family, she was a star, instructing the creation of Latin dishes, generating on-the-fly dance parties to old melodies from the record player, and teaching all of us kids to keep the good times going by chanting in unison no te vayas (dont leave) when someone was ready to skip out early on her party. I never understood, until recently, how much I envied her talents.

My mother was also driven to charity and ran food drives with our local church, collecting extra canned goods wherever, whenever. She maintained a list of folks in the community who needed the extra food and personally delivered it. With boxes packed to the brim and one of her daughters reluctantly in tow, my mother would visit each recipient. Really, visit.

Her visits were often long and drawn out: shed enter their homes, sit down at the kitchen table, and take a cup of tea. As a little kid, I was restless and felt like we were imposing by taking anything from someone with so little. But my mother knew this exchange of hospitality was the most sensitive way to offer what she could: extra food and an empathetic ear.

My mother was marvelous in these moments. She delivered a gift of food and, in the same instant, delivered a world of love, compassion, and old-fashioned hospitality. I am nowhere near the person she is, but I keep trying with every gift I package.

The recipes in this cookbook developed through my building a business but also through unknowingly trying to be exactly like my mother. Theyre assembled in chapters from easiestrecipes that you can pull together on the way to a gathering or made fresh and gifted in momentsto most ambitiousrecipes that require a bit more patience but yield great reward (yes, I mean the spirits). And while you should give whatever you want at any time of yearbecause food is almost never an inappropriate giftIve also suggested uses and gifting occasions within many of the recipes.

As you work your way through the chapters, youll discover how natural it is to craft food gifts to store in your Food Gift Love pantry for whenever the need may arise or to offer for specific occasions to your loved ones or to the neighbor down the street who just popped in to share tomatoes from her yard. In fact, gifting food with food is like a double rainbowtransformative and remarkable and entirely too rare today. Lets go change that.

While the gifting of boutique food eventually became a habit for me, my business Eat Boutique did not happen overnight. In fact, it came to life over many years of writing and living in all sorts of food places.

Born as a blog in 2007, Eat Boutique became my path toward a life in food. A couple years in, I crafted my first gift box of small-batch food from mom-and-pop-style makers across New England and sold out of it instantly that holiday season. The moment Eat Boutique was featured in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, I started shipping food gifts year-round. I also began hosting pop-up retail markets, gathering makers and their food fans in a single space for shopping, sampling, and a bit of cheer. In 2013, Eat Boutique won the International Association of Culinary Professionals award for Best Culinary Brand; it was a significant moment because there I was, reveling in it all, standing with Alice Waters. When anyone asks at what point it felt like a real business, I joke that it was probably the moment I cried in front of Alice Waters. But it was likely years earlier when I had put Eat Boutique on hold to travel regularly to Paris for work.

Boutique is originally a French word used when referring to a small shop. I didnt fully understand its meaning until I lived in the city of light and enjoyed legendarily good food on-and-off for months at a time, exploring the delicious nooks and cobblestone crannies of Paris. Coming from the country of big-brand retailers who use the term boutique so liberally, I found Paris to be charming and focused on small and special in a way that was new to me.

Every other day, I picked up a baguette two blocks from my apartment. I got to know the man who kneaded the dough and timed the baking in such a way that yeasty aromas drifted down the avenues as the workday ended. I also learned to savor one super-soft passion-fruit caramel a few times each week, rather than gorge on a bag of manufactured candy at one sitting as some of us are wont to do.