Cookbook author to share stories, soup at Fireside

WASILLA — Sometimes a bowl of soup is deeper than it looks.

Former Bethel District Attorney Laurie Constantino has spent the last 27 years finding her niche as a cookbook author, collecting recipes for and ingredients around her current home in Anchorage as well as Limnos, Greece, where she and her husband Steven spend five or six weeks a year.

Though she’s “always cooked,” culinary school wasn’t even on Constantino’s radar when she started college. She believed in her law career, but sometimes needed a break, and found her peace by making food.

“Law’s kind of abstract and it can be frustrating. …You basically fight other people’s battles for a living, so cooking was always the perfect release for me,” she said. “It’s something concrete and satisfying, and it makes people happy.”

Now 13 years retired from law, Constantino has developed a “love affair” with Mediterranean cooking that has led to not only the publication of her first book, “Tastes Like Home: Mediterranean Cooking In Alaska,” but an understanding of and desire to help victims of the Syrian conflict.

In addition to the nearly 200 recipes published in her 2007 cookbook, Constantino has a recipe featured in “Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate Our Shared Humanity,” by Barbara Abdeni Massaad, published in mid-October. Profits from the sales of the book are donated “to help fund food relief efforts” through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, according to soupforsyria.com.

In the credits, Constantino’s name falls among famous food experts such as Anthony Bourdain of CNN’s “Parts Unknown” and Jerusalem-born, U.K.-based restaurant owner and writer Yotam Ottolenghi, one of Constantino’s biggest inspirations, she said. She called herself a “peon” in comparison to such figures, but was glad to be a part of the effort to end hunger on the shores of her second home.

“I think that it’s pretty hard to live on any of the Greek islands and be in the Aegean Sea without being acutely aware of what’s going on in Syria,” she said.

Though she has not had any direct contact with refugees, Constantino recalled graphic descriptions of hunger and “babies washing up on Greek beaches,” relayed to her by an Alaska-born friend who lives in Greece. She didn’t have to see it to believe it.

“I just have a great deal of sympathy for people who are just living their lives, trying to do the best they can …and all of sudden everything they’ve built over a lifetime is destroyed,” Constantino said.

Where’s the soup?

While the money drawn to the U.N. may seem the most real, tangible benefit of “Soup for Syria” for starving refugees, Constantino said the actual meals created from the recipes can impact both the person in need and the individual who purchases the book.

“If somebody has died or is sick or depressed, you can’t fix the problem by bringing them (the survivor) food, but you can sometimes put a smile on their face just for a minute,” she said.

And if there’s a story behind the dish, that can compound the impact, she said. In interviewing and gathering old recipes from fellow members of the Greek Orthodox church she attends (she has about 700 Greek cookbooks, 400 of which are church publications, she said), Constantino grew keenly aware of how much culture and family history is preserved in a recipe passed down for generations.

“The stories are as important to me as the recipes.”

That said, the recipes have to work.

“There’s really nothing more frustrating than following a recipe that you think is going to be good and having it not turn out,” she said.

But when it does turn out — and a person serves it up with a smile and a story — she said, a meal can work wonders, if only for one life.

“We can’t have an effect on very much, but on individual lives we can have very big effect.”

Constantino will be at Fireside Books in Palmer on Saturday, Nov. 28 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. to sign both her book and “Soup for Syria.” A pot of her Greek Chickpea Soup with Lemon and Rosemary (the “Soup for Syria” recipe) will also be available for tasting during the day.

To learn more about Constantino and her tips, tricks and favorite cooking utensils, visit laurieconstantino.com. She is currently working on her second book, “Greek Cooking in America: The Best Recipes from America’s Greek Festivals and Community Cookbooks.”

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.