goodI did not receive the edition I ordered. I received the older edition. The picture shown is the newer edition however that is not the edition I was sent.I purchased Through the Kitchen Window out of curiosity because I know one of the authors and I wanted to see what her writing was like. And begrudgingly I bought the actual book because it was not available on Kindle. Rarely do I do either of these things, but was surprised and happy to find a beautiful feast between the covers.As I read Through the Kitchen Window over a period of weeks, it came to occupy its own special place on my kitchen shelf. I read while corn boiled, while chickens roasted, while pies backed and while ice cream custards cooled. I read and savored every story, each a own perfect bite. While I cooked food for my body, the chapters fed my soul. Each tale was like a new recipe, a new set of ingredients, a new flavor, a new way of putting words together to describe the experience of food. I would not have wanted to read any faster, for like a hurried meal it would have provided little taste and a lot of indigestion. And although I have finished the book, it will continue to live on my kitchen shelf.Through the Kitchen Window taught me, or helped me remember, that food is not about shopping lists, not about counting calories, not about calculating fat grams and carbohydrates ... that the end result of cooking is nourishment, not the number on the scale. Through the Kitchen Window reminds us that food is about the food and about so much more than the food. The pages speak to our primal knowledge that food and cooking are about love and emotion, sharing, family, art, tradition, celebration, and most importantly about change. Where cooking before was a chore for me, a way to feed myself and my family, after reading Through the Kitchen Window I have discovered that cooking is something enjoyable, something relaxing, something creative.I heartily recommend buying a copy. A copy you can hold in your hand and turn the pages of. Put it on your kitchen shelf, and treat yourself whenever your spirit is hungry.For the two weeks my grandchildren join their dad at our house every summer, we celebrate: Thanksgiving dinner one evening, an Easter Egg hunt early on a cool morning, and always a Father's Day picnic with fried chicken and potato salad. It's the only time all year we're together, and family memories are more important than the calendar. Food is an important and essential part of the memories. Writing in Through the Kitchen Window, Helen Barolini sees the kitchen as "an embassy of cultural tradition." We are ambassadors of our heritage.In this fine book, Arlene Voski Avakian presents a collection of American women's essays, poems, and recipes considering the importance of food, cooking, and kitchens in women's lives. These glimpses through kitchen windows provide diverse views: Julie Dash's admonition never to stir Geechee red rice after it comes to a boil appears together with Joan Ormondroyd's wonderful memories of her Russian-Jewish grandmother's beet borsht.These kitchen memories come sweet and sour. Letty Cottin Pogrebin takes pleasure in holding a cookbook with her mother's handwritten recipes. Maya Angelou recounts with pride how her mother used her kitchen and cooking skills to open new doors for her family. But Marge Piercy sees a burnt meal as "not incompetence, but war," and Helen Barolini says, "growing up I had deliberately stayed as far awaya from my mother's kitchen as I could."There is great value in Through the Kitchen Window, not only in the glances into other lives and the feeling of togetherness (and sometimes separateness) that the stories evoke, but also in the way they call back memories of our own lives. I started a list of food and kitchen memories while reading the first essay; and by the time I laid the book down, the list was pushing seventy-five entries. Now it lies on my counter, still growing with memories as varied as the tales in this book. A gallery of good taste indeed!Read this book with your notebook in your hand and a napkin tucked under your chin. And stir up the ginger crinkles on page 63, and be a little girl again.by Patricia Nordyke Pandofor Story Circle Book Reviewsreviewing books by, for, and about womenAs with any anthology, the appeal and the quality of the essays here varies, but what prompted me to write a review is the extraordinary tone of smug superiority that wafts off of all too many of those found here. The most egregious example of that smugness is to be found in a vicious little piece by Sally Bellerose in which she regales the reader with her saintly forebearance as she describes the horrors bestowed upon her delicate consciousness when she deigns to honor her reactionary parents with her presence at their dinner table. And could you have a book of this kind without including that Queen of Noble Suffering, Maya Angelou? She's represented here with a snippet from her often anthologized book "Wouldn't Take Nothin' For My Journey Now." There's also the pro forma male bashing in many of the essays ("Now I cook as a woman, free of that feeling of enslavement with which a male culture has imbued the process of preparing food.") There's also the stereotyping that often goes along with this kind of generic thinking; eg. "Everyone knows that TV dinners are mainly the province of heterosexual males and the career woman who lives alone. Gay men often enjoy cooking and are generally as good at it as the most creative woman." The editor is a professor in the women's studies program at U. Mass, Amherst. I doubt there's much room for discussion in her classes, unless that discussion serves her dogma. It's not the politics I disliked so much as it is the unquestioned assumptions and the tone of sanctimony that cling to these memory scraps. If you're already in the choir, this book will be happy to preach at you, but if you have yet to sign off on every blessed stereotype of oppression, you may find it annoying in some places,offensive in others,