Press Kit

“These poems are a feast of colour, taste and texture, delivering a vision as clear as glass – but mind the
sharp edges. There is a fierceness here, a willingness to see what a woman is for even when the answer
is hard and bloody.  A remarkable collection, exhilarating and heartbreaking and not to be missed.”

~ Blurb by Leslie Vryenhoek

“Brilliantly executed. Hobsbawn-Smith presents a bold Feminifesto! This poetry looks you square
in the eye and it eviscerates you. It is holy, a point of exclamation. It is a reclamation of power
in all aspects of empowerment. That said, please read this book, it is an experience you do not
want to miss.”

~ Blurb by Sheri-D Wilson

“This collection unravels joy and mortality in the kitchen and on the dance floor.  Through the
precise listening of women, the intricate textures of rage and domestic ritual shine with the
beauty and danger of peaches in a canning glass.”

~ Blurb by Aritha van Herk

“This intriguing debut novel involves three generations of female descendants of an off-colony
Hutterite family. A tale of secrets, trauma and resilience, this compassionate story will resonate
with a wide audience of readers.”

Free Press reviewers weigh in on their top titles for 2022
~ Review by Bev Sandell Greenberg

“Saturated with poetic imagery, a juicy plot, and longing…The novel’s part mystery and part
history… and a quiet love story’s percolating on the side. Readers will root for Luka, whose
lifelong search for her mother parallels a perennial desire for happiness…

Hobsbawn-Smith pays keen attention to what grows in prairie gardens and fields… Food too
gets spotlighting… And what’s a proper prairie novel without descriptions of winter?…
Fabulous.
My favourite scene concerns Anky’s wedding night consummation at the Bessborough Hotel. I
read it and howled. Bet you will, too.” ~ Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

Bread & Water is an emotionally arresting, beautifully written series of essays that tell of a woman’s journey of ambition and exploration. Interwoven throughout is the consideration of food as a concept that connects and grounds us while so much else, be it youth, beauty, love, and even a lake, are fleeting.

~ the Jurors, 2022 Sask Book Awards University of Saskatchewan President’s Office Nonfiction Award 

Bread & Water is a mesmerizing collection of essays and meditations. From the first essay to the last, I learned to bake with the author, suffered her losses with her, and drew strength from her words. Bread & Water is soul food.

~ the Jurors, 2022 Sask Book Awards City of Saskatoon Award 

Hobsbawn-Smith seamlessly weaves together memories of her hunger – for food, for love, for connection, for justice – in a voice reminiscent of the later writer Laurie Colwin (and a little of Nigel Slater)…Food is a wonderful agent for storytelling – each ingredient tells a story, each dish is a living history, each eater shares the act of eating with passion – and Bread & Water demonstrates this brilliantly: Hobsbawn-Smith’s writing is generous, loving, and nostalgic without being saccharine. Most importantly, she shows that food is more than what we eat. This beautiful collection evokes the words of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin from The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Trandscendental Gastronomy (1825): “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”

~ Sarah Ramsey, Quill & Quire, starred review.  

I know this dexterous writer, and expected a great read... The text behind the gorgeously apropos cover photograph—a chunk of homemade bread and a glass of water—is wide-ranging, provocative, and, like that heel of bread, hearty. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d admire these lyrical essays… And yes, these essays concern food, food culture, the restaurant industry, locavorism, gardens, farmers’ markets, preserving, and even the import of using appropriate knives, but I’d argue they give equal space to Hobsbawn-Smith’s observance of and appreciation for the wondrous natural world… Here’s wisdom: “Food and cooking are complicated snapshots of our culture.” The author demonstrates this… I’ll tell you what’s irresistible—this delicious book.

~ Shelley Leedahl, SaskBooks 

“Saskatchewan writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith is proudly descended from off-colony Hutterites. It’s this unique identity that informs her new book, Bread & Water…. an autobiographical culmination of her storied life inside and out of the kitchen… it’s a rare treat to read an eloquent account by a trained chef who knows her subject matter… Hobsbawn-Smith’s love of food is a lifelong commitment and her passionate devotion seeps into every page… Prairie readers will also relate to Hobsbawn-Smith’s decision to return home to the family farm as an adult… poignant as the writer navigates the technical aspects of acreage life during climate change… There’s no snobbery in this collection. Instead, you’ll find an amalgam of love, good food, family and friends. This marvelous collection situates the chef-writer within the lauded tradition of authentic food writing. Hobsbawn-Smith belongs to the same vaulted company as the iconic American food writer, M.F.K. Fisher. Read Bread & Water. Sneak it in your mother’s Christmas stocking. Mail it to your daughter. Add it to your book club list. But don’t lend out your copy: it’s a keeper.” ~ Excerpt from a review by Patricia Dawn Robertson, Winnipeg Free Press 

“Writing about cooking is not always just about food… dee’s book immediately captures us and underscores what is important:  our relationships with others, with pleasure, with the planet.  And, oh, the writing about food!… it’s a sensuous experience; she brings her poet’s eye and ear to everything within her purview… her title could have added that this was a book about family or a book about finding oneself. A book about taking risks – whether it’s jumping with a horse or leaping into a job she wasn’t ready for…cooking and caring for others through the way family and food intertwine… The physical and sensuous experience of making pleasure for someone else… Dee also links cooking with care and gratitude for the planet by writing about her commitment to slow food, a commitment to knowing your local farmers, cheesemakers, and vintners… what goes on in the backrooms of restaurants: the sexism, the physical demands… the essay called “Floodplain” is the occasion of some of dee’s most poetic and insightful writing.”

~  Professor Emerita Kathleen Wall, Blue Duets 

“Step aside, oil barons and cowboys, this is the Calgary of little old houses on the Bow River, small restaurants with a lot of gumption, and local produce in a region that some associate only with fields of exported alfalfa and feedlot-fattened beef. 

Hobsbawn-Smith’s short-lived but influential restaurant, Foodsmith, was one of the first in Calgary to feature local producers. In a charming prairie take on the “100-mile diet” Hobsbawn-Smith recalls the reaction of her mother—who had been a dryland farmer in Saskatchewan for decades—to the experiment. She quips, “Don’t those BC writers know that some of us have been eating locally our whole lives?”  

Hobsbawn-Smith inherits some of the straight-talking style of her mother, but hers is infused with a deep love of the art of cooking that includes the language of fine dining (cassoulet, confit) even if the lamb was raised in Olds and she picked the rhubarb herself. In her essays she impressively manages this collision of worlds with a wholesome, approachable style… 

A mouth-watering book… The most memorable scenes always take place in her kitchen with a wood stove roaring and a soup bubbling. She is at her best describing the textures and smells of favourite recipes and walking the reader through the process of cooking. The writing is visceral…Hobsbawn-Smith shares valuable insights about being a woman in the culinary world…she is honest about the trials of the food industry: stress, high demands, sexism…I loved a surprise essay about a meeting with Wiebo Ludwig… this book is rich with memories and insights into the role of cooking in the author’s life and her appreciation of local producers.” ~ Megan Clark, Alberta Views 

“Bread & Water is a bittersweet love letter… the title’s simplicity reflects these essays’
groundedness in the basic human need for connection… food descriptions are rhythmic and
zesty… mouth-watering language… And she is deliciously funny…. In a book where summer
“flow[s] from spring like a butterscotch sundae” (69), readers can expect to feel hungry. And
maybe even, stirring within, a longing to knead” ~
Angeline Schellenberg, 15 December 2022

“The four essays that tell this watery story – focussed on place, identity, and nature – are for me
the heart of the book. They’re long and meditative, narrated by a mature writer… They remind
me of Luanne Armstrong’s The Light Through the Trees… and of Brian Brett’s Trauma Farm… If
water is the heart and food the bones of this book, the head and feet are provided by food
writer MFK Fisher, the American food writer, and dee’s father W. Paul Smith… there’s an entire
life in this book, from childhood to late middle age, filled with dee’s dreams for herself and for
her children. But it is also a table groaning with food.” ~
Ariel Gordon

“Hobsbawn-Smith’s diverse, poetically drawn characters engage in acts of faith and failure, hope and resignation, and that murky band of grey that lies in between…  My favourite [story] is “Appetites” because the writer’s knowledge of all things food shines through effortlessly… All of dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s stories are written with a poetic edge. Her descriptions, particularly western landscapes, are often luxurious, lending themselves a kind of nuanced impression, a delicate fingerprint on the reader’s mind.” 

~ Lee Kvern, Alberta Views 

“dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s [What Can’t Be Undone] stories begin when love and comfort have faded, or the fatal accident has happened, the fire has burned the house, loved ones or brutal ones are already in their graves. What is left to write about? I’d say a whole lot. Hobsbawn-Smith’s characters are not life’s victims but life’s bludgeoned survivors. Like their earthy forebears, these modern descendants learn to live with regret, and they keep on keeping on. This kind of gutting it out is the very definition of Western grit, and these fine stories are parables of resiliency.”

~ David Carpenter, author of Welcome to Canada 

“Stories firmly grounded in Western Canada and all predicated upon a serious loss. Now that something’s become undone, the characters in these stories must pick themselves up, somehow, and move on… As the ancient Greeks long ago figured out, humans are beautiful because of their mortality, their losses. These stories shoulder that beauty well… A strong and vital first collection.” ~ Bill Robertson, Saskatoon Star Phoenix 

“It will come as no surprise to readers of wildness rushing in that dee Hobsbawn-Smith is also an accomplished chef. Here is a feast of tastes and flavours arriving from many regions and nooks of existence, served up with a wisdom that knows its wordless “loveliness in loss” equally with its sharp jolts of awe. She’s been there, and brought them to the writing with passion and wit. Savour the lovingly evoked texture of Bennett’s old garage, with its Victory Bond poster and the typewriter ribbon unspooling from a shelf; the cow moose with its “dancer’s drawl”; that painful moment when a lover’s movements undressing flashes back to the father’s arm reaching for a the belt. These finely focussed poems invite us into a sensuous and emotionally rich landscape: o taste and see.“

~ Don McKay, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip

“dee Hobsbawn-Smith makes art out of her own life in Wildness Rushing In. And a rich life is definitely in the details of each and every poem. The writing is honed and textured, the senses so alive that you can practically taste the language. There are moments of brilliance rare in a first book.”

~ Jurors citation, SK Book Awards

“You’ll want to rush into the wildness of Hobsbawn-Smith’s musical and playful writing, but make sure to slow down and absorb the beauty of her images.”

~ Jurors’ citation, SK Book Awards

“As an author, an artist, a cook, a thinker . . . dee has created an important treatise on the evolution of culinary Alberta [with Foodshed]. This is a great book, as free-form and unconventional as the author herself.”

~  Anita Stewart, Member of the Order of Canada, Culinary Activist, Author, and Founder of Food Day Canada 

[Foodshed is] A rich encyclopedia of facts, farm-gate lore and original recipes… a politically engaging narrative in which Hobsbawn-Smith articulates the challenges and joys faced by small-scale producers… don’ t let the alphabet theme fool you. This is no tame nursery rhyme; it is a locavore call to arms.”

~ P. D. Robertson, The Globe and Mail 

“dee is a woman of many talents. Talents that may boggle the mind of the average Joe, being a chef, author, educator, consultant, advocate and poet are just a few of the pursuits with which the mother of two fills her days. A classically trained chef, caterer and baker, she also introduced Calgarians to the city’s first local food restaurant… A vital and vibrant woman, dee is a skilled educator and has been teaching people how to cook since 1987, a talent that shone when we visited her kitchen… it seems effortless for her to chop mushrooms, stir stock, and add dashes of fresh herbs from the pots in her sunroom to the ever-growing pot of stuffing for the chicken ballotine, all the while carrying on an upbeat and informative conversation. She loves to feed people, one of her many talents that had become obvious to us during our afternoon on the farm.”

~ Jenn Sharp, Saskatoon Star Phoenix 

“Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet is the fifth book for dee, an M.F.K. Fisher Award winner for culinary writing. In it, along with the main dish of stories aligned with each letter of the alphabet, she has seasoned the offering with 26 original recipes. She also serves up well-researched explanations of current food issues and trends, and still manages to keep the whole meal appetizing enough that we’ll want to go out and reap the bounty of her creative A-Z harvest. The work is a synthesis of her 20-year-plus, Alberta-based career as SAIT culinary grad, chef, restaurateur, culinary educator, consultant and advocate.” 

~ Karen Anderson, Calgary Herald 

“I have been mad about [Foodshed’s] cover design since the first time I saw it, and I LOVE alphabet books, which rarely cater to my reading level and so I had to own this. I was not sorry. It turns out that reading about Alberta’s food culture is the most splendid way to learn about Alberta proper– its demographics, culture, topography, geography, climate, politics, and environment. It was an extraordinary education, and wholly engaging to read.” ~ Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This 

“I first met dee in her days as a chef and restaurateur; I have come to know her much better as the extraordinary investigative food journalist that she is today. [In Shop talk], dee has chronicled the enormous progress of our city’s culinary resources.”

~ Sal Howell, proprietor, River Café, Calgary, AB 

“dee Hobsbawn-Smith is the undisputed queen of all that is local and regional in foodstuffs. She knows more about Alberta growers and producers than anyone else on the planet. And it’s a good thing she can write as well as she does, so we can all know about and appreciate what is going on in our back yard.”

~ Kathy Richardier, editor & publisher, City Palate: The Flavour of Calgary’s Food Scene 

 “The Herald’s own Curious Cook takes her culinary expertise home, where she cooks up savoury Sunday Birds, Saturday Soups and Mid- Week Meaty Mains. Hearty fare with a big helping of sophistication.”

~ Joanne Sasvari, The Calgary Herald 

“Hobsbawn-Smith is a passionate advocate for supporting local chefs, producers and growers in the collective making of food… because she grew up cooking what they were growing in their own fields, Hobsbawn-Smith has brought that mindset with her and spread it to culinary kitchens everywhere. The common thread running through her cookbooks is who they are intended for: people who appreciate good food, are raising children and leading a busy life, but do not want to have to resort to burgers for dinner every night. Her theme of the curious cook… relates to the idea that your cooking style can only progress if it’s always evolving.”

~ Barbara Balfour, Sudbury Star 

“Hobsbawn-Smith is an Alberta food writer who brings a much- needed local/regional touch to her work. I especially like her chapter on cooking real food and her 12- step program for novice cooks.”

~ Judy Schultz, The Edmonton Journal 

“It kills the cat, but helps the chef: curiosity… dee Hobsbawn-Smith laments the growing gap between commercialized food and home cooking. Fast food and ready-made dinners have lured many of us – particularly younger generations – away from good homespun cooking. But the three-time cookbook author who turned to food writing 10 years ago says “people still want ‘real’ food in spite of commercial temptations.”  When she cooks at home for her spouse and two teenagers, she keeps things simple, but when time allows, she experiments.”

~ Bruno Petosa, The Montreal Gazette 

“I’ve long admired dee and her ability to write. It goes without question that her recipes are delicious, but beyond that are her unique observations about cooking and how it relates to life in general. [The Curious Cook at Home] is much more than a book of recipes. It’s like getting together with an old friend to share tales and insights.”

~ John Ash, chef, teacher, and author of John Ash Cooking One on One: Lessons from a Master Teacher

“Well-seasoned cookbook author, dee Hobsbawn-Smith, is much more than a recipe maker and chef extraordinaire. She is also a terrific writer and witty storyteller. In The Curious Cook at Home, you get it all: well-crafted food and engrossing tales from the kitchen.”

~ Kathy Richardier, Publisher/Editor of Calgary City Palate

“Quick Gourmet follows the successful Skinny Feasts and gives you her creative twist on that daily whirlwind we call cooking dinner….flavourful stuff that’s chic enough for easy parties and fast enough for five o’clock. A mom and a great teacher, dee knows what works and offers lots of tips for stocking a pantry and organizing a speedy kitchen.”

~ Cinda Chavich, Calgary Herald 

“Quick Gourmet is not for people who rarely venture into the kitchen. As the word “gourmet” in its title implies, this book is meant for serious cooks, people who know their gorgonzola from their orechiette and who don’t fret that the children will turn their noses up at, say African Lamb and Pumpkin Soup, or Miso-Marinated Tuna with Pickled Ginger — not to mention the Ahi with Wasabi… interesting recipe combinations in what could probably best be called “fusion” style.”

~ Daniel Drolet, Ottawa Citizen 

“[Skinny Feasts is] an informative and quirky (if wordy) guide to an eclectic West Coast style of cooking. She has assimilated more scientific knowledge about the workings of the kitchen than most writers, and uses this to advantage in discussing techniques. She is also, in the best grow-your-own tradition, a bit of a produce freak.”

~ John Allemang, Quill & Quire 

“Anyone who knows Calgary’s dee Hobsbawn-Smith knows she’s a thoughtful and articulate woman with a passion for food that spills out of her like water. She’s also passionate about her kids, her husband, good wine — all of the things that make us passionate about her. Now the local chef and caterer has written down some of her vast knowledge and is sharing it in a new book, Skinny Feasts … creative recipes (all penned with good health and balance in mind), there are lots of nifty little anecdotes about her life behind the stoves of the world and important lessons in cooking techniques.”

~ Cinda Chavich, Calgary Herald 

“Dee brings to her first book all the enthusiasm she brings to her cooking classes, food writing, catering and life in general. It is a joy to have dee cooking beside you whether she is there in person or not.”

~ Bonnie Stern, cookbook writer and educator extraordinaire

“While the title suggests low-fat cooking, more importantly, Skinny Feasts is about good food and how to enjoy it.”

~ Deborah Madison, chef and author of The Greens Cookbook

“If you appreciate intelligence, style and wit in both food and writing, you’ll find much to savour in Skinny Feasts. It’s a culinary adventure.”

~ Kathy Richardier, publisher, City Palate

“When it comes to a philosophy of cooking, dee – chef, caterer and cooking teacher – is a woman after my own heart. I had a hunch this was true as I browsed through her super new cookbook Skinny Feasts. I was sure of it after we chatted by phone late last week while she was in town on a busy cross-country media tour. What dee calls her “chef’s perspective on cooking low-fat food” is a godsend for those of us who refuse to sacrifice flavor in order to eat healthy fare.”

~ Marion Kane, Toronto Star