Cook For Your Life

Book excerpt: 2016 James Beard Award nominee and 2016 Books For A Better Life Award winner A beautiful, unique cookbook with delicious recipes for all stages of cancer treatment and recovery, from a two-time cancer survivor and founder of the Cook for Your Life nutrition-based cooking programs. Cook for Your Life is a one-of-a-kind cookbook for those whose lives are touched by cancer, organized by the patient’s needs. Self-taught home cook and two-time cancer survivor Ann Ogden Gaffney discovered during her months of treatment for breast cancer that she was able to find powerful relief for her symptoms through cooking. Realizing that other patients and families could benefit from the skills and techniques she’d learned, she began to offer advice, recipes, and free classes to fellow patients. A former fashion consultant, Gaffney realized after her treatment that her heart was no longer in seasonal colors and hemline trends. Instead, she wanted to help people with cancer and their families cook and care for themselves. In 2007,the nonprofit organization Cook for Your Life was born. Its programs have received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and have been embraced by organizations such as Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Mount Sinai Health System, Atlantic Health System Cancer Care, the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge in New York City, and more. Cook for Your Life has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. Now Gaffney delivers her very first highly anticipated cookbook, based on Cook for Your Life’s classes. So many cancer cookbooks are too complicated to follow for someone going through the treatment, or too clinical and uninspired to encourage anyone with compromised taste buds to enjoy. This is the first cookbook to organize the recipes into categories according to the way patients feel and their needs in the moment—for example, “Simple” recipes when the patient is fatigued, “Safe” recipes when a patient’s immune system is compromised, and “Spicy” recipes when a patient is feeling better and needs to wake up her taste buds. With its warmth, authority, beautiful design, and smartly conceived format, Cook for Your Life empowers patients and families to cook their way back to health.