Jenner - In the kitchen with Kris : a kollection of Kardashian-Jenner family favorites

I love Christmas so much! Especially Santa.

When I married Robert Kardashian, I was twenty-two years old, and one of the gifts we received as a wedding present was six weeks at a cooking school in Los Angeles. It turned out to be one of the absolute best gifts we would receive because it literally laid the foundation for what would become a crucial part of our familyfood and cooking.

I dont remember the name of the school, but I would go there several times a week and they covered everything from appetizers to desserts. I learned how to cook things I had never even eaten before. And I loved every minute of it. I would come home and practice the recipes on Robert and my mom and our friends, and I noticed that people were really enjoying the food. I discovered, Hey, I can really cook!

When I was growing up, my mom was a single mother raising two kids and she worked. Sometimes she didnt have time to make it home to cook for us so I would cook for my sister and myself. I might make a poached egg and some toast or open a can of spaghetti or something. I remember feeling very grown-up when I had to cook and I knew when I had a family that this would be a major part of my job as a mother and a wife.

These cooking lessons brought it all home. It gave me the foundation to do all of the things I had envisioned when I was young and would think about raising a family. I knew cooking would be a part of that experience.

One of the first things I learned was how to make brownies. I share that recipe in this book and it was Robs favorite. I also learned how to make a chicken liver pt, which has become one of my moms favorite things to eat. And they taught me how to make pasta. This is one dish that I improvised on, making various types of pasta and experimenting with sauces.

But more than learning how to cook, cooking school sparked in me the desire to make a hometo try new things. It helped broaden my horizons and I was able to pass that along to my children and my grandchildren, and now you!

Today, cookingor rather, preparing meals in my kitchenis one of my favorite things to do. No matter how hectic our schedules, or how crazy our lives may be, we start our day in the kitchen and we end it in the kitchen with a meal and a bottle of wine. The kitchen is where we share our stories from our day, where we laugh, and where we heal.

Cooking and my kitchen has become the glue that has kept our family strong throughout the years. And the recipes Im sharing are part of our familys history and traditionsome very old, some new.

Early cooking lesson for Kourtney and Kim.

I collect cookbooks. I have more than a hundred. Rocco DiSpirito or William-Sonoma cookbooks are my go-to cookbooks because the recipes are so easy and simple. But I have cookbooks from all over the world. I buy them whenever I travel. I have several from France (one of my favorite places in the world), and I picked one up in Vienna recently. But my best cookbook is the one I have housed in several notebooks. I have a notebook for every kind of recipe imaginable. I have a notebook just for chili, stews, and soups. I have a notebook just for Thanksgiving, which is my second favorite holiday. I rotate dishes from year to year, but of course, there are family favorites that always make it to the table.

I have a notebook of desserts for everything from a Fourth of July cake (I use blueberries for the stars and rows of strawberries for the stripes) to an Easter Bunny cake, which I do every year. I dye the coconut green for grass and use jelly beans for the eggs. Its delicious!

I have a special spot in my heart for desserts because thats how I got my children interested in cooking. When they were little, I would have them in the kitchen with me baking cookies and making cupcakes. There would be frosting and mix everywhere and, of course, fights over who got to lick the bowl. One Christmas I spent hours in the kitchen making a gingerbread house. I mean a real gingerbread house! It actually took me two days to put it all together. And all of the kids ended up sick with stomachaches from eating half of the candy they were supposed to be using to put on the house. But those are memories that they will have forever.

I also keep traditional family recipes, such as Nana Helens Beeshee. Helen was Roberts mother and she would make beeshee (which is an Armenian pastry like a pancake) every holiday. As Nana grew older, I knew she would not have the energy to make them much longer because they were a lot of work. So Kourtney, Khlo, and now Kendall learned the recipe and they can all make them almost as well as Nana did. The last time she made them, I videotaped it so that we would always have that recipe in our family and they would know exactly how it was done.