Laurie Sandell

Meet Jenny Rosenstrach, former Cookie editor (RIP Cookie), foodie, writer, illustrator, and friend of several decades–we went to Hebrew school together. In fact, aside from my dad, she was the first person to encourage my cartooning; I used to draw a comic strip just for her called “Famous Faces,” in which I’d draw our classmates and teachers and she’d have to guess who was whom. Since Cookie folded, she’s been using her considerable energies and talents to write a cookbook, create a blog, write magazine articles and raise her two adorable girls, Phoebe and Abby. Let the record show that despite her relentless optimism, she has a dark side. I saw it myself, when, in the middle of brunch on Saturday, she pulled out a camera, and as I smoothed my hair and offered a camera-ready smile, she instead snapped a photo of her food. This is a woman who has documented every single meal she has cooked for the past 10 years or so; she is the Henry Darger of food, and runs the risk of becoming one of those freakish outsider artists whose unintelligible scribblings will be found under her bed after she passes, to be studied by suicidal goth chefs for years to come.

She also happens to be married to one of the very best (if not the best) editors in the business, Andy Ward, who edited my Esquire piece back in the day, became the executive editor of GQ, and is now an editor at Random House. Andy was the first person to encourage me to write about my dad, and Jenny was the first person to assign me a magazine piece–a book review of a Barbie coffee-table book for Biography–so the two of them are more or less single-handedly responsible for my career. I like to keep things in the family.