Liz Clark was born and raised on a farm at the juncture of the Des Moines and Mississippi Rivers in Southeast Iowa. A graduate of Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Liz is a founding member of the Society for American Cuisine and the Heartland Food Society. A member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and the American Institute of Wine and Food, Liz received a diploma in Cours Intensifs from La Varenne in Paris, studied at the Moulin de Mougin in France and the Cooking School at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. The American Institute of Wine and Food featured Liz as one of the "Leading Chef's of the Mid West" in 1989. Besides this book, Liz has contributed to Barbara Grunes's Heartland Food Society Cookbook, Susan Herrmann Loomis's The Farmhouse Cookbook, and the James Beard Foundation's The James Beard Celebration, edited by Barbara Kafka. She currently operates a cooking school and a private, by-reservation-only, restaurant in a restored 1847 Italinate Villa-Style house on a bluff above the Mississippi River in Keokuk, Iowa. Jill Vorbeck, the "apple lady," peels, cores, and slices apples in a farm kitchen in central Illinois. She and her husband, Tom, began orcharding in 1977 after abandoning city careers as systems analysts. Today they grow over 200 varieties of apples, the best of the antique and modern, and operate Applesource - the mail order marketplace for specialty apples.