Lavish Praise for Food from My Heart "There's as much for the serious reader in Zarela Martínez's book Food From My Heart as for the serious cook. Martínez's memoirs of growing up in Mexico…make great armchair reading…" —Los Angeles Times "Restaurateur Zarela Martínez does double duty in Food From My Heart, writing brilliantly about people and culture while demonstrating how to make quite fabulous dishes." —Cosmopolitan "Zarela Martínez is an absolute genius with flavors and this book is a great guide to her talent. I count it as one of the most interesting and invaluable additions to my library, which dates almost forty years." —Craig Claiborne Food and life are inseparable in Mexico—not just eating to live but eating to celebrate, to come together, to worship God and spirit. In Food From My Heart, Zarela Martínez describes the connection between Mexican culture and Mexican food—a collision of Old and New World ingredients, and the culinary influences of a constantly shifting ethnic mosaic. Through the telling of her own story, Martínez reveals the inextricable bond that exists between food and religion and the way Mexicans mark birth, death, marriage, and the daily business of living. Drawing upon the influences of friends, family, and traditional foods from many regions in Mexico, Martínez has created her own personal style of cooking: imaginative and highly flavorful, easy to prepare, and evocative of the classic Mexican cooking upon which it is based. It is all brought together—the traditional and the new—in the form of memoir, stories, and more than 175 recipes to create this unique cookbook.