Bread & Water

dee Hobsbawn-Smith is an award-winning author, essayist, poet, fictionist, chef, curious cook, food writer and runner who lives rurally, west of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. An ex-restaurateur and longtime freelance journalist, she has written eight books, including Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet ; The Curious Cook at Home ; and Wildness Rushing In: Poems.

CONTENTS Preface Introduction Learning to Cook Watershed Cooking for James Jobs That Taught Her More Than Cooking Prairie Pragmatic Bellow Whale Watching Slow Down, Dammit Love Affair with a Wolf Shell Games The Spiral Tunnels Annual Canning Bee Floodplain Wiebo's Way The Pleasure of Your Company Prodigal Handmade Ashes Rapture Surrender in Iambic Tetrameter The Lake, Leaving Postscript Notes Acknowledgements

"It will come as no surprise to readers of wildness rushing in that dee Hobsbawn-Smith is also an accomplished chef. Here is a feast of tastes and flavours arriving from many regions and nooks of existence, served up with a wisdom that knows its wordless 'loveliness in loss' equally with its sharp jolts of awe." Don McKay , winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip "Written with heart and intelligence, Bread & Water: Essays is continually entertaining and rewarding. The toneself-aware, curious, a little vulnerableis at once individual and communal, and creates a winning humility perfectly suited to the essays' explorative nature." Judge Tim Bowling, SK Writers' Guild 2014 John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award "An eloquent, lively contemplation of food and its myriad connections to life." Alice Major "[Bread & Water] will send you back to your own kitchen to do it with care, gratitude, and love." Trevor Herriot , author of Towards a Prairie Atonement " dee's passions for the visceral stuff of lifefood, cooking, love, running, loving, grievingbeckon us all to the table." Jennifer Cockrall-King , author of Food and the City "[dee Hobsbawn-Smith's] words are luminescent on the page, weaving together images and stories I won't soon forget. No matter where you are, her words feel like home." Renee Kohlman , author of All the Sweet Things and Vegetables "This marvelous collection situates the chef-writer within the lauded tradition of authentic food writing. Hobsbawn-Smith belongs in the same vaulted company as the iconic American food writer, M.F.K. Fisher." Winnipeg Free Press "Food is a wonderful agent for storytelling -- each ingredient tells a story, each dish is a living history, each eater shares the act of eating with passion -- and Bread & Water demonstrates this brilliantly: Hobsbawn-Smith's writing is generous, loving, and nostalgic without being saccharine. Most importantly, she shows that food is more than what we eat." Quill and Quire (Starred Review)