Colorado Local Competing on New Season of PBS Show The Great American Recipe

For Abbe Odenwalder, a blogger and upcoming contestant on season two of PBS's The Great American Recipe, food is more than simply something to keep your stomach full. She believes that food — and, more specifically, the recipes behind it — is a way of connecting the past, the present and the future.

Odenwalder grew up in Kankakee, a small town in Illinois. Her grandfather moved his entire family there from Lithuania in 1938, just one year before World War II began.

Although her family is Jewish, Odenwalder notes that living in Kankakee meant "there was no access to keeping kosher." She also suspects that because they were immigrants, her family "wanted to fit in and become American." As a result, Jewish food was reserved for the Jewish holidays that they celebrated, and the majority of Odenwalder's diet consisted of meat because her grandfather owned a grocery store and worked as a butcher.

She headed west during her teenage years and attended Colorado State University. "I pretty much started cooking in college. I decided that I liked entertaining," Odenwalder says. "I realized that if you just have a couple good things to cook, everyone will want to have a party at your house."

But her food didn't just make her house the ideal party scene; it was a way to foster a welcoming community. Like Odenwalder says, "The best way to bring people together is through food. Even if you disagree, whether it's politics or religion or family, most people can agree on what's good."
Once Odenwalder finished college, she decided to make Colorado her permanent home. Other than her love for the mountains and the fact that her hair was less frizzy in the drier climate, Odenwalder says she saw Colorado as a state where "people just really want to be here" and a place where she could "meet people from all over."

While she didn't have any formal culinary training, Odenwalder honed her skills by working in restaurants, doing catering and re-creating food that she encountered while eating out and traveling. She's tried her hand at everything, from Jewish, Cajun and Vietnamese to Mexican and Middle Eastern cuisines.

Despite her upbringing, Odenwalder no longer eats beef, though she does eat chicken, pork and seafood. "I saw a movie about cows, and I felt so bad after that, I stopped eating [beef]. My husband prays that I don't [watch] a movie about chickens," she jokes.

Odenwalder is a full-on cookbook connoisseur, with over 500 in her collection. "What I find so fascinating about cookbooks is that they're stories that can be passed on," she says. "During the Holocaust, people in the concentration camps would tuck recipes into the barracks where they stayed. I would often wonder why these people were thinking of recipes when they were starving. But you would read some of the stories of the survivors talking about how these were happy, comforting memories, and the thought of sharing food together was something that got them through each day."

She continues, "For me, when I look at recipes, especially Jewish recipes, you think of all the variations on one simple recipe that were lost. When I cook a Jewish recipe, it's a privilege, because to me, it's perpetuating the story. It's making it live on."

Odenwalder also wants any potential grandchildren to inherit her own stories and memories through her recipes. She began sharing her own recipes with the world on her blog, This Is How I Cook, about eleven years ago. "It was a few years after my kids left for college," Odenwalder recalls. "They kept calling home for recipes, and my daughter finally said to me, 'Mom, you need to start a blog.' So I did — I started a blog, and it grew and grew until I finally monetized it."

This Is How I Cook is an agglomeration of Odenwalder's recipes, which span a variety of cuisines and flavors. Her recipe process is based on both knowledge and experience. "For example, let's say that I'm cooking lasagna. I look at all my cookbooks for all the possible lasagna variations, and I take whatever I want, ideas from each one, to create my own," she says. "Sometimes it doesn't always work the first time. Sometimes I try a second or third time, but I've cooked long enough that things usually work out for me."

Recruiters for PBS's The Great American Recipe discovered her work via Instagram. Last June, Odenwalder received a message through the social media platform about a television show that was casting. After a few rounds of interviews, Odenwalder left to film in September.

The show's premise revolves around finding "the great American recipe" by gathering home cooks from different backgrounds across America. Odenwalder says that it was "something [she] and the rest of the cast never would have found themselves to be a part of, and that was what made it special."

Since The Great American Recipe highlights the multicultural blend of American cuisine, Odenwalder notes that "[it's] a different show in the sense that it doesn't have the terrifying moments that maybe other cooking competitions do. We all rooted for each other. Honestly, I think we all will be friends for the rest of our lives."

The show will begin airing on PBS on June 19. Additionally, at the end of the eight-part season, select recipes from the show will be compiled into a cookbook available for purchase.

"We're already planning ways to get together," she says of her fellow contestants. "We were trying to talk to PBS, saying, 'Hey, we need a reunion show. Can you put us all together again?' Not that they've bought into that. I don't think we're even close," she quips.