Best friends for more than 20-years, this photo was taken of Joy and Angie during their trip to Rancho La Puerta in April 2018.

ABOUT JOY

Joy Stocke received a Bachelor of Scince in Agriculture Journalism and studied food science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where she learned how to professionally test recipes. For more than thirty years Stocke has devoted her life to telling stories through the lens of family, culture and food. For more than a decade she was founding partner and Senior Editor of the online magazine, Wild River Review.

Stocke has written about and lectured widely on her travels in Greece and Turkey and the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. She continues to study techniques of cooking and recipes with home cooks from around the world and pracitces her craft in Central New Jersey and New York City where she leads cooking classes. Her essay, Turkish American Food, the first about Turkish cooking in America, was published in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.

In addition to Tree of Life: Turkish Home Cooking and Anatolian Days and Nights: A Love Affair with Turkey, Land of Dervishes, Goddesses and Saints, both co-written with Angie Brenner, she is author of a collection of poems set on the island of Crete, Cave of the Bear and a novel, Ugly Cookies. She is currently writing a memoir about her time in a fishing village on the Sea of Cortez.

About Angie

Freelance writer, home cook, yoga instructor, and illustrator, Angie Brenner has always followed her passions. Years earlier, she left a corporate job to combine a love of diverse cultures, literature, and cuisines by purchasing a travel bookstore in Del Mar, CA.

After traveling the four-corners of Turkey (now for almost thirty years) she closed her bookstore and became immersed in travel and writing about Turkish culture and food that culminated in two books co-written with Joy Stocke, Anatolian Days and Nights, A Love Affair with Turkey and the recent, Tree of Life: Turkish Home Cooking.

Today, with travel restrictions and stay-in-place mandates — and inspired by a pre-pandemic trip to Morocco — Brenner is testing new recipes in her home, fusing the cuisine, ingredients, and spices of cultures along ancient trade routes, and offers cooking demonstrations and classes. She is currently writing a biography of artist, architect, and visionary, James Hubbell, due for publication in 2020. She lives, cooks, writes, draws, and teaches yoga classes, and is designing Zoom cooking classes in her hometown of Julian, California.