Essential Ingredients

Chocolate…

Peppermint…

Cinnamon and Sugar…

The smells of childhood memories and summer romances…

Memories flood through taste buds. Sweet and savory aromas awaken passion. Lillian uses her Monday night cooking class to stir up love, friendship and delicious treats. In her debut novel, The School of Essential Ingredients, Erica Bauermeister portrays how the lives of eight people are brought together through food. Lillian, the chef, who creates unique but exceptional flavor combinations, uses her class to help an older couple remember their passion, a young mother remember who she is and more. This original work is riddled with delicious recipes and individual anecdotes.

For her first novel, Erica Bauermeister is already a success. She gained insight into the art of food appreciation through her two years in Italy.

Praise for The School of Essential Ingredients

“In this remarkable debut, Bauermeister creates a captivating world where the pleasures and particulars of sophisticated food come to mean much more than simple epicurean indulgence.”

–Publishers Weekly

Lay Me Down

I just now watched the movie Marley & Me, and I sobbed myway through it. At one point I had to leave the room, and I still tear up just thinking about it. Books and movies like these really touch close to home to pet owners, just like a book I recently read called Chosen By a Horse by Susan Richards.


"Lay Me Down expressed affection by sighing. I saw it as an expression of relief, a letting go of all the tension she carried in that big body for such a long time, the horse equivalent of 'Phew, I made it.'
She sighed a lot. She sighed when I poured the bran mash into her feed bin. She sighed when I put her blankets on at night, and she sighed in the morning when I took them off. She sighed at her hay, she sighed when I brushed her, she sighed when I kissed the end of her nose...great big wet sighs, big enough to spray me with snot sometimes; loud, wet affectionate sighs...Sometimes I sighed back...I wanted her to know I felt the same way. I was relieved, too. 'Phew, we've made it,' I sighed. We were both safe."

In this memoir, Susan writes of her experiences rescuing an abused mare and her foal (mother and baby horse for those of you who don't speak horse). The mare, Lay Me Down, is so full of love and trust, even though she suffered terrible abuse at the hands of humans. While Susan tries to rehabilitate her, Susan learns things about herself and pushes herself to be more open to love, just as her horse is.


"Two kindred spirits find each other in this beautifully written memoir about the human-animal bond." -Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation


I cried myself through this book, too. (I'm a bit of a cryer...if it wasn't already apparent.) If you like horses...or really any animals, you should definitely read this book! It's already a national bestseller!