About the Author

Karen Jean Matsko Hood has always enjoyed cooking, baking, and experimenting with recipes. Hood entertains large groups of people and especially enjoys designing creative menus with holiday, international, ethnic, and regional themes. Hood is publishing a cookbook series entitled the Cookbook Delights Series, in which each cookbook emphasizes a different food ingredient or theme. The first cookbook in the series is Apple Delights Cookbook. Hood is working to complete another series of cookbooks titled Hood and Matsko Family Cookbooks, which includes many recipes handed down from her family heritage and others from more current family traditions. She has been invited to speak on talk radio shows on various topics, and favorite recipes from her cookbooks have been prepared on local television programs. Hood was born and raised in Great Falls, Montana. As an undergraduate, she attended the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, and St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. She attended the University of Great Falls in Great Falls, Montana. Hood received a B.S. Degree in Natural Science from the College of St. Benedict and minored in both Psychology and Secondary Education. Upon her graduation, Hood and her husband taught science and math on the island of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Hood has completed postgraduate classes at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa. In May 2001, she completed her Master's Degree in Pastoral Ministry at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. She has taken postgraduate classes at Lewis and Clark College on the North Idaho college campus in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and Taylor University in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Hood is working on research projects to complete her Ph.D. in Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Hood resides in Greenacres, Washington, along with her husband, sixteen children, and foster children. Her interests include writing, teaching, and volunteering as a court advocate in the juvenile court system for abused and neglected children. Hood is a literary advocate for youth and adults. Her hobbies include cooking, baking, collecting, photography, indoor and outdoor gardening, and the cultivation of unusual flowering plants and orchids. She enjoys raising several specialty breeds of animals including Icelandic horses, Nubian goats, bichons frises, cockapoos, Icelandic sheepdogs, Newfoundlands, Rottweilers, and a few rescue cats.