Merle Rosenbloom immigrated from South Africa to the United States in the 1980's, bringing her love for entertaining and food.  She opened a food-basket business and later a successful catering company.  Fast forward several years, she started hosting cooking classes for her newlywed friends. Her recently released cookbook, Starting From Scratch: Cooking and Entertaining Made Simple  began as a simple collection of her favorite recipes, bound in a book for her new daughter-in-law.  The requests for copies starting pouring in so she took the original cookbook to a new level and created a hardback cookbook with 160 pages that covers 77 easy-to-make recipes and sections focused on a) organizing your kitchen with the necessary utensils and equipment,  b) how to stock your pantry with the essentials so that it's simple to create recipes on-the-fly, c) table setting examples and d) menu suggestions for two, four or six people.  

Merle will be the featured speaker next month at Dallas' Canterbury Book Review Club.  

Here's an easy-to-make appetizer, Chicken Drumettes, featured in the cookbook which calls for only 3 ingredients: