Cover Story: Laura Kurella

FOR LAURA KURELLA, IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD THAT MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD

By Dave Person david.r.person@gmail.com

Self-taught cook and food columnist Laura Kurella is on a mission to help people improve their health through the food they eat. “I work to make a positive difference in the lives of others; that is my mission, and I do it through food,” says Kurella, who is celebrating 20 years of sharing stories and recipes in numerous publications, primarily in the Midwest.

Spark magazine and its sister publication, Good News, are among those that carry her recipes. She also is a culinary correspondent for The Food Channel, sharing recipes, columns and photographs. Kurella, who called St. Joseph County home for several years and began her career as a food columnist there, currently lives in Wellston, between Cadillac and Manistee, with her husband, RIchard Taylor.

Kurella will be returning to her former stomping grounds in Southwest Michigan Nov. 6 for the 5th annual Happy Holidays Community Expo and Cooking Show at Constantine High School.

The expo, featuring local artisans, crafters and businesses, will be from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Kurella’s cooking show, an event staple all fi ve years, will be from 2 to 3:30 p.m. At the free event, Kurella will release her latest cookbook, Midwest Morsels: Memorable Recipes and Refl ections. “It’s a memoir of my life as told through recipes,” she says. Kurella, 61, who has two daughters and seven grandchildren in the Cincinnati area, realized the importance of healthy eating when her father died suddenly of a heart attack when she was in her teens.

“My father was a healthy man for the most part, and he was only 58,” she says. But he did not have a healthy diet. “He loved everything that had fat,” she says. “You can’t consume all that animal fat and not have consequences,” Kurella says. “It ended up causing me to look at food differently.” A native of northwest Indiana, Kurella owned and operated a tool business

there, and although she was careful with her food intake, she developed other bad habits and ended up having a stress-induced “cardiac event” of her own when she was in her 30s.

“I was living a very stressful life and I was consuming caffeine all day long. I started with a pot of coffee, not a cup, in the morning, and in the afternoon I switched over to Coca Cola,” she says. After her health scare, she started eating herbal foods, and in 2001 she purchased a summer getaway in Colon. A reporter for the Colon Express suggested she write a column for the newspaper, which she did, called “Folk Medicine.”

“By November I was picked up … by the Sturgis Journal,” she says. “The following spring the editor there said I was getting so many requests for recipes that I should really be writing a food column. … So I started providing recipes.” Her new column, Vitality Cuisine, soon started running in the Hammond Times and South Bend Tribune.

“I went from being read by a thousand people a week in the Colon Express to being read by 100,000 in a year’s time,” she says. Other requests followed. “It just all came fl ooding in and I could not say no to any of them. My life was just a blur. I ended up moving to Michigan full time and closing up the tool store.”

After Kurella and Taylor married seven years ago, they lived in Wisconsin for a while before moving to Wellston. “I promote Michigan agri-tourism in my work,” she says. “I combined my work of eating healthily with the amazing produce you can get in the state of Michigan.” “I never stop thinking about recipes or food,” she adds. “It is the actual food itself that is the catalyst. …. My recipes (often) begin with fi nding this awesome piece of fruit at the farm stand. “I’m just looking to make food that makes you feel good, and is helpful to the body instead of harmful.” Taylor tends a large garden and he and Kurella take advantage of the proximity of fresh Michigan fruits such as cherries, apples, peaches, pears and plums. “We can subsist off the land as far as food goes,” she says. The fresh fruit and vegetables also fi nd their way into her recipes and columns.

“Michigan’s got such fantastic produce I can’t not write about it,” she says. Kurella has won numerous awards for her recipes, and this year, for the third time, will have a recipe entered in the World Food Championships. The recipe, for Popped Espresso Mocha Pillow Crisps, won a “People’s Choice” award through the Minnesota Cultivated Wild Rice Council.

Kurella says she accidentally discovered popped wild rice by putting the rice in something else she was cooking and fi nding it popped into a more tender and tastier version of its original state.

She buys a container of Haagen-Dazs Ice Cream (“If you’re going to eat ice cream, buy the best,” she says), cuts it into four slices, adds a stick like a popsicle, covers it with dark chocolate and then presses it into the popped wild rice for a delicious treat.

Mocha pillow crisps follow a similar recipe, but marshmallows take the place of the ice cream. After being dipped in dark chocolate they are rolled in chopped wild rice and espresso powder. Kurella takes pride in the fact she is self-taught. “I’m not trained in any of the fi elds in which I work,” she says. “I’ve never even taken a cooking class. “My work has just evolved over the course of time through experience. … I never planned for any of this.”