When award-winning food writer Sasha Martin started the popular Global Table Adventure blog, she had a simple plan: chronicle her quest to prepare a meal from every country in the world for her picky-eater husband and new baby girl—all from their small kitchen in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

After her editor encouraged her to go deeper, this straightforward project ultimately turned into a quest to make peace with her own troubled past and introduce her young daughter to her global neighbors through food. Martin documents her search—and shares 29 recipes—in her new memoir, Life From Scratch, published by National Geographic. Our interview has been edited for clarity.

I never really had that unconditional home. Certainly love was there, in different forms, but the idea of a place I could call home wasn’t