Why Festive Food?

There is an unshakable connection between food and celebrations. The Festive Food Project was born from our shared love of meals that are rich in tradition, both personal and cultural. Whether we’re cooking dishes from our own, varied backgrounds—Irish, Italian, Greek, English and Jewish—or exploring the cultures around us, we love nothing more than giving our families and friends a delicious taste of the world.

Using our traditions as a foundation and our home base of Brooklyn as inspiration, we’ll share recipes that celebrate holidays from around the world, all year long. Special occasions and holidays are best spent with family and friends, enjoying a home-cooked meal, and we hope you’ll feel that joy too. By cooking and eating our way through a year of global holidays, we hope to expand our appetites, our cooking skills, and our horizons—and to do it with our families, and with you.

Jeannine

I’m a home cook in Brooklyn, and I love to prepare delicious and sometimes exotic food for my family and friends. My biggest inspiration in the kitchen is my Italian grandmother, Nonna, who lovingly cooked Italian feasts for our entire family and also introduced me to many other cuisines…Middle Eastern, Cuban, German and Jewish, to name just a few. Most of all, she taught me that at the heart of any memorable celebration is a great meal, and I love that my daughters now share in that tradition as well.

Zanthe

Growing up in New York City as the children of European parents, I always felt lucky to be connected to so many different cultures. Living the better part of a decade in California launched my love of home cooking as well as a new appreciation for Asian and Mexican cooking. One of my favorite parts of being a mother has been introducing my daughters to the astonishing variety of delicious food out there in the world—and best of all, in Brooklyn we never have to travel far to leave our culinary comfort zone! I’m excited to bring that same global exploration to a wider audience.