For Olivia, Thomas, Emma, Luis, Antonio…and Blue

July 24, 2026

Today we celebrate the wedding day of Olivia and Blue and officially welcome him to the Sueiro clan. Today they promise to spend each day of the rest of their lives working together to answer one of life’s most challenging questions: What do you want for dinner?

We Sueiros have a legendary love of food, and a strong culture of gathering daily around the family dinner table. We are more varied in our passion for the actual cooking part.

It is an undeniable truth that cooking is one of the greatest creative human endeavors, as well as one of the most tedious, repetitive chores. Even those of us who love to cook struggle with it.

I have always enjoyed cooking. It is my respite at the end of the work day—a meditative, creative, logistical puzzle that I deeply enjoy. That said, I barely cooked in my busy 30s—Jason and I call it the ‘Takeout Decade’. It wreaked havoc on our health and our wallets, and drove me to master what I now call the Art of Scrounge: maintaining a well-stocked pantry and freezer that allows me to put together a quick and healthy dinner no matter how tired and hungry I am.

More importantly, cooking is my favorite love language, one that Gary, Therese, and I learned early from our mother, father, and grandmother. We kids didn’t learn how to cook from them so much as we learned how to live well. To take time to work together to turn basic ingredients into a sociable evening, spending hours side by side talking, laughing, listening. This is the real reason people loved to come to our house for dinner—it wasn’t the food, though that was always plentiful. It was the company. The warmth. The joy.

The kitchen has always been the heart of our family homes, from West Park Drive to Mexico, Rockville Centre to Sonoma. The pleasure of preparing and sharing family meals, hosting large holiday gatherings, welcoming strangers at our tables, and touring the world with our stomachs are among our most cherished Sueiro pastimes, and our preferred method to express affection.

Now you, the OTELA generation, are all grown up, with kitchens of your own. As you embark on a lifetime of feeding yourselves and others, I had the idea to gather a collection of family stories and recipes that I hope will bring you happy memories, connect you to your heritage, inspire your creativity, and keep the tedium at bay. I don’t imagine you’ll often pull out this book to recreate these specific dishes, but I do hope you will sometimes flip through and be reminded of the old expression “you are what you eat.” Because in this family, that means you are made of love.

It is important to note that nobody in this family is particularly fond of following directions. At least while cooking. My father was a great cook, but he famously never made the same thing twice. As Anne told me when I asked her for recipes to include here, “I have been cooking for my family for thirty+ years, but have not a single recipe written down.” My mother did have a small recipe box, but she threw it away when she sold the house. We gave her grief about that, but I never saw her actually use it anyway. All this to say that putting together a family cookbook required a bit of creative license. All measurements are approximate, and details are open to your interpretation. I’ve also left a few blank pages at the end for you to jot down your own creations. I hope you will share them too, so we can keep building our story online at cookbook.sueiros.com.

I look forward to the next time we cook and eat together.

All my love,

Susan