The most amazing thing about writing a cookbook entitled “I Am What I Ate” is that for the first ten or twelve years of my life I pretty much hated every type of food there was.  To this day, I still get uncomfortable sitting at a table with a bowl of cooked spinach in front of me. As the years went by, I began to realize that it wasn’t that I didn’t like the food as much as the way it was prepared.  My mom was a great cook.  She just missed her mark once or twice.  I’m not quite sure why, but as I grew older I started to eat everything.

Growing up in a Pennsylvania Dutch household, I was exposed to many things other children could only dream about.  Scrapple, Pickled Eggs & Beets, Shoo Fly Pie, Creamed Dried Beef on Toast, the list goes on.  You could always count on mom to serve up a well rounded meal at dinner. One meat item, one potato item and one vegetable. And of course gravy.  That woman could make gravy out of anything.

At nineteen I moved to the west coast with my sister Bea.  Southern California to be exact.  Talk about a different culture. The weather, the people, the food.  I’m ashamed to say it but it wasn’t until then that I tasted my first burrito.  In my defense, none of my newly found west coast friends had ever tasted Pork and Sauerkraut.  It’s pretty amazing, but when you’re on your own at nineteen with not a lot of cash, you’ll eat almost anything.  The one thing I always had going for me though was an ability to cook for myself.  That was probably due to the fact I had been working in restaurants since I was fifteen.  I was shucking oysters long before girls. 

At thirty-seven I began hosting a cooking show called Food Rules.  I got to cook whatever I wanted and you know what?  People liked it.  Since food and cooking have played such a big part in my life, I thought it only fitting to put together this cookbook.  I hope there are some things in here that you would not normally cook for yourself and you go ahead and try a few.

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