Acknowledgments

A cookbook is like a great recipe: it’s in process until dinner’s served.

Thanks to Michael Szczerban, our editor, who worked with us through (yikes!) nine months of proposal rewrites to get this book to where it is. Mike, we saw you from afar and knew you were the editor for us. You made this book better at every turn.

Thanks, too, to our publisher, Reagan Arthur, for believing in us and in this book enough to get Little, Brown behind it in a challenging environment for books.

And thanks to Nicky Guerreiro for sloggin’ away on the zillions of editorial changes in the manuscript. You and Mike worked so hard (and so gently) to make sure our voice came through, while bringing our words into greater focus.

We couldn’t do this career without our agent, Susan Ginsburg at Writers House. Almost thirty books and counting? Not to mention the ghosted ones for celebs? And the knitting ones. And the memoir, almost finished. How is that possible? We make a great team. And you make a great osso buco.

Thanks, too, Stacy Testa at Writers House, who has never proved anything but extraordinary, even when we interrupt anything else (and probably everything else) you’re doing.

We jumped for joy when we heard Deri Reed would be our copyeditor. We pray for the day when we can write your name into every contract we sign.

Laura Palese, the book designer—we had no idea how you were going to turn that absurdly complicated manuscript into something that worked on the page. You went beyond our imaginations. And we have prodigious imaginations.

Finally, at Little, Brown, we owe an unpayable debt to Ben Allen, our production editor, and to Lisa Ferris, our production manager, for so effortlessly (well, seemed like it) bringing this behemoth to heel (or to print, take your choice); to Zea Moscone for her PR work; to Lauren Velasquez for a marketing push; and to Julianna Lee for designing a cover so good, it may well start a trend.