Take a girl with an iffy start in life. Mix in wanderlust and cooking. Add a dollop of yearning for home and belonging. Knead in a pinch of self-discovery. Let rise and ripen. The result is award-winning author Cynthia D. Bertelsen’s Stoves & Suitcases, a reflective saga that begins in an incubator. Where the author first discovers the world’s culinary diversity as nurses fed her sweetened-condensed milk formula. Later, cookbooks pique her wanderlust and her longing to be elsewhere. A semester abroad in Mexico and a stint in the Peace Corps in Paraguay ignite those embers of wanderlust. That fire never stops burning. Years of living and working and cooking in the developing world follow, with long-term sojourns in Honduras, Haiti, Morocco, and Burkina Faso. And travel to many other corners of the Earth. Stoves & Suitcases weaves an age-old tale of leaving home to find home. (Contains over 100 recipes.)

For me, stoves became something akin to altars, something almost holy, places of communion where I could prepare meals and share the fruits of my labors with others. ~ Cynthia D. Bertelsen