Cooking & Screaming: Finding My Own Recipe for Recovery

Not many 21-year-olds expect to have a stroke while walking down the street of their college town, but that’s what happened to Kane, food writer and blogger of nosheteria.com. What started off as a casual stroll resulted in weeks of unconsciousness, months of rehabilitation in the hospital and years of daily therapeutic exercises, all due to an arteriovenous malformation (commonly known as an AVM), which initially left her completely paralyzed on her right side. Drawing strength from her love for cooking, Kane started to make physical and emotional progress by relearning how to chop vegetables by using her immobile right hand as a weight. As she struggled to rebuild her life “post AVM... often fraught with anxieties and self-imposed rules,” she followed her passion for food by starting a successful catering business. Kane nicely integrates memories of her childhood, family portraits (including details about her own father’s stroke 13 years earlier) as well as many wonderful recipes into this story of recovery. (Feb.)