Home Front Cooking: Recipes, Wit, and Wisdom from American Veterans and Their Loved Ones

Food brings families and friends together, providing not only nourishment for our bodies, but also the glue that holds our families and society together. It is around the dinner table that we interact and important announcements are made—it was chow time in the foxholes when soldiers came to know each other, forming bonds so strong they would risk their own lives for one another. Remembering the smells and tastes of home support many in difficult times, those memories captured here in photographs and recipes.

Homefront Cooking brings you a collection of treasured family recipes and photographs from military service members past and present, and their loved ones. Recipes are accompanied by brief stories and memories related to the recipe, military service, and/or lifestyle.

The stories range from anecdotes passed down from great-great grandfathers who served in the American Civil War, to tales of terrified family members caught in a foreign country when John F. Kennedy was shot, to the stories of service members serving in Afghanistan and Iraq today. Many are heartwarming, some are humorous, most are bittersweet. All are written with a sense of pride and passion, and offer a glimpse of a lifestyle that is as unique as it is challenging.

All authors’ profits will be donated to a charitable organization in support of veterans.

Tracey Enerson Wood is a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist from a multi-generational military family. She has authored magazine columns and other nonfiction for publications serving the military and military families, and written and directed plays of various lengths. She served as an active duty spouse for many years, working for military health and support services both professionally as a registered nurse, and as a volunteer. She resides in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Beth Guidry Riffle served as a military wife for over twenty-seven years, and is the mother of an active duty service member. She has decades of experience working with military families, and is currently the director of military community outreach and military community and family policy, where she and her team are responsible for strategies to inform the military community of programs, policies, and services that support service members and their families. An accomplished cook, she specializes in Cajun cuisine, but is best known for creating the world’s most fabulous chocolate chip cookie.

Carol Van Drie is a writer, artist, and wife of an Army officer. She has thirty years' experience of learning to cook on a budget, with strange ingredients in foreign countries, for three growing children, for her husband’s guests, and in a new kitchen about every year and a half. She has written two books as well as news articles and humorous columns for publications large and small. She and her husband now live in Okemos, Michigan, where she continues to write, needle-felt, visit with her grandchildren, and play with her two mischievous Cornish Rex cats.