The Catcher in the Rye

Ojakangas earned a degree in home economics—"which sounds very '50s," she concedes—then traveled and worked in a hospital kitchen before landing a job at Sunset Magazine in California. She wrote The Finnish Cookbook while she was on staff there, then moved to Duluth where her husband Dick had found a job. "I had so much fun working at that magazine," she says. "I kept trying to make life as interesting as it was there, after having this fantastic job."

Her way of making life interesting, then, was to crank out a cookbook every year or two and, as if she needed a further challenge, to open a restaurant in Duluth in the late 1960s and early '70s, called Somebody's House. The way she tells it, it was a tiny operation, barely more than a hamburger stand. But then Dick, listening in on the conversation, points out that at one point they had 45 employees.

Even today, with 25 books under her belt, "it's not just sitting down and eating casseroles and putting our feet up," Ojakangas says with smile. Recently she's been busy writing a regular column for the Duluth-based Woman Today, cooking a Peruvian dinner for 12 she had donated to a silent auction, staying active in the church choir, and giving a talk on coping with rationing during World War II. It must have been hard to get by on just two and a half pounds of red meat per person per week, she scoffs.

Could this be the meaty seed for Ojakangas's 27th cookbook?