Food from my Heart is now available!

Food from my Heart was a seminal  book that should have been written now instead of  the time when I was relatively  unknown.  Though it was nominated for Best International Book of the Year  by the James Beard Awards committee and received an immense amount on press, sales were not exactly what we had hoped they would be.  It was no longer in print and customers and my readers who had finally discovered it kept asking me for it so I asked the  publisher to give me back the rights and they did.

I decided to self-publish it exactly as it was with the help of Cyndi Shattuck, an archivist and photographer, who did an excellent job of scanning each page and her husband, Fitz Gitler whom I’ve known since he was a precocious child,  worked on the cover, designed  by my good  and generous friend Milton Glaser  It would have been too expensive to change the set up and I have improved on some of the processes in the book but  I will keep you informed about any new techniques or tricks I discover  if you’re a member of my news feed at zarela.com. We worked with Create Space ,a division of amazon.com and it was a breeze.  I highly recommend them.

I also plan to make a DVD in the near future and include it with the book.  I’ll add many photos of the food, table settings, ingredients and such  but the fun part I thin is that  I will include family photos so you can see who i is when I tell a story.

The book will be available for sale at amazon.com soon but you can also order it from me.  I’ve priced the book at $15.00 plus tax and shipping for my web readers but the retail price is $20.00

We have  not released it to the press so I am including the Publisher’s Weekly review of 1992:

From Publishers Weekly

The author, proprietor of the Zarela restaurant in New York City, promises “a memoir, a guide to Mexican culinary basics, and a personal recipe collection, all interspersed with glimpse-by-glimpse evocations of Mexican life and culture.” She keeps the promise. Recipes and techniques are here in abundance, yet the book is truly for those who always wished that culinary introductions, notes and sidelights on appreciation would never end. Martinez delivers both personal reminiscence and cultural insight with the taste and candor of an experienced hostess–a memoir of a family servant nestles up with a fiercely patriotic sidebar on the “Manana Syndrome.” Raised among Sonora’s ranching aristocracy (“By the time I was 14 I was busting broncos”), she shows how she came to immerse herself in her country’s food traditions and–beginning with modest catering projects–soon found herself lionized in New York by the likes of Paul Prudhomme and Craig Claiborne. Her approach is not one of ethnic purity or “authenticity” understood narrowly; she blithely combines traditions from different regions within single recipes, “my own personal process of mestizajesic , synthesis.” And, indeed, she attributes the makings of her crab enchilada to a chef for a California restaurant chain.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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