The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Feast for Generations 1600–2024 by Rachel E. Ford

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

A Feast for Generations 1600–2024 by Rachel E. Ford https://www.amazon.com/Feast-Generations-1600-2024-Rachel-Ford-ebook/dp/B0DF657932 This book is more than just a cookbook it’s a tribute to a rich family legacy passed down through generations. Spanning over four centuries, it preserves treasured family recipes, faith-filled traditions, and the stories that have shaped the family over time. The book invites readers into a warm, welcoming world of culinary traditions, where each dish carries meaning and history. With recipes that have nourished families and communities for generations, this collection is filled with memories, heartfelt stories, and food that ties the past to the present. The pages of this book open into a tapestry of flavor, heritage, and family history, giving readers a deep connection to every dish served. From the cherished traditions of Grandma Clara’s recipes to the memories built around the family table, A Feast for Generations provides a unique perspective on how food brings people together, celebrates milestones, and unites communities through time.

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Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today, an amazing young lady on this show here are we talking about her books. She's a pretty prolific bookwriter. I think over 22-ish books, I'll just say. I know we have a list. And she loves to write and share wonderful stories that you're just going to go to Amazon

and click every book and put it in your cart once we're done here. Her book is, her first book we're going to discuss today, is called A Feast for Generations, 1600 to 2024 by Rachel E. Ford. And I believe it just got published yesterday, April 6, 26th. Correct. by visionary book publishers. So we're going to get into with her. Welcome to the show, Rachel.

How are you? I'm doing well today, Chris. How are you? I am excellent. It's good to have you on. Give us.coms, websites, social media. Sure. People are going to find you.

Email is easy. It's just Radiant Journey at Yahoo. I have a page on Facebook that is Radiant Journey Through Life. I'm on Instagram with Radiant Journey. Also, Radiant Journey Through Life. And my publisher has a page for me at visionary book publishers backslash Rachel hyphen Ford. And I got several different variations of a bio on you from you and your folks. Let me do this because it's all in first person and I need it in a third.

Let's have you give us a kind of a rundown of a bio of what you've been doing in your life. So I'm a child of the 60s and now in my 60s. I grew up in Northern California and a family with four siblings. We were a typical working class family in those days. My dad moved us to the valley when we were in elementary school. I grew up in Butte County with the high school there, joined the Forest Service, was a firefighter, joined the military, got injured in the line of duty and came out and raised two children, one of whom is profoundly disabled and is a key part of the next book we'll talk about. And when I left that being a mom all the time, I worked in legislative advocacy. I taught special ed and ended up retiring after being a social worker, a supervising social worker for 12 years. And all through those careers I wrote, I wrote a lot of curriculum. I wrote for myself. I taught public speaking and writing to my clients who were trying to improve her better themselves so they could go out and be gangfully employed.

Ah, that's a wonderful thing. How did you, you know, I've been talking to in the pre-show as we've been planning out the show. And you seem like you really care about people. I don't know if I'd call you a giver. I don't want to put words in your mouth or your character. But you seem really nice. There was a story we talked about, homeless people. What's the foundation for a lot of things you've talked about in your books

and trying to improve the world through your influence? Absolutely, trying to improve the world and trying to let people know that that saying that the change begins with you is absolutely true. And the first person you have to change if you're not happy with what's going on is yourself. You can't expect other people to change for you. You have to change yourself. Be happy who you are. And then go out and seek like-minded people.

And I grew up in a house like that. My parents accepted everybody on Thursdays when we were in middle school and high school. If we were going to go out on the weekends, all those kids had to come and have Thursday night dinner with us. So my parents could meet who we were with and to know what we were up to. What? It sounds like responsible parenting. It was kind of sneaky. How are you ever going to get screwed up if you're raised that way?

I know, I know. Completely inappropriate. Absolutely. Yeah, that sounds like really good parenting. And we can't have that because how are you going to end up on Twitter? I don't do that yet, but I'm going to learn. You might want to just go to TikTok or someone. It's pretty toxic.

Okay. Tell us about this book that you, that you have that we're talking about today leading off with, a feast for generations, 1600 to 2024. The cover of the book has a picture of my great-grandmother four times removed in front of what was called a beehive oven on the backside of her inside fireplace. And those were used to cook pastries and cakes and things that needed a more even temperature for a longer period of time. And so it started with just finding that photograph. I spoke to my sister, who's a chef. she's retired now and I spoke to one of my husband's cousins who also worked in catering

and we thought we've got all these great family recipes that come from generations of people. We were able to go back to, on my family's side, to the Iroquois Nation and find turkey stew and cranberry relish, things that our families still make. We just started putting together this collection of recipes during the pandemic that was going to be for us. And then we started adding these stories and it became really interesting, not only to us, but to other people that we shared it with. And through this, eating different people's food at different people's tables, people can come together. Even if we have nothing else in common with our neighbor, I can bet you that your neighbor likes to eat something that you also like to eat. And you can come together off that one tiny little thing and build tremendous friendships.

That's amazing. You know, they used to call that Breaking Bread. They did indeed. Yeah. You know the thing behind that term. Absolutely. Yeah. I didn't, I'd never heard of it, the term breaking bread.

And I had a friend of mine, he calls me up one day. He goes, he goes, hey man, I'd like to bring you a loaf of bread. And I was like, what? You know, and we were friends. We hung out. But one day he calls me, he goes, I want to bring you a loaf of bread. And I'm like, oh, what's that about, dude? You know, it's got a out of the blue.

the bread thing. And he explained to me, he goes, no, you're a friend of mine. I care about you. And I want to break bread with you. And I'm like, you know, you can just mail it if you want. And he goes, no, do you not understand what breaking, you know, bread? Breaking bread. And for some reason, I was thinking of breaking bad, which is a different sort of friendship. Different sort of friendship. Yeah. Yeah, pizzas on the roof. So a whole different, it's not bread, folks. Anyway, and so he explained to me that the way that we used to operate in the day was strangers. You know, we were all pretty remote. You know, we might have a farm somewhere, you know.

And strangers would come and pass. And if they were good strangers, maybe, I don't know how you'd evaluate that. Maybe that's, you'd have to break bread with them to find out. But you would, you would welcome in your home. And you, you know, people would be like hotels. But they would also get news, right? So the stranger would bring you news of what was maybe going on the world or stories or entertain you.

And you would host them and then you would break bread with them. And that was the way of learning about them and the best way to learn about people. I mean, what was that great show with that great chef who used to travel the world? Oh, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. And he sadly died by suicide. That was very sad. Yeah.

I used to watch that. Another story about that comes from biblical times when it was against the law not to let strangers spend the night in your house. if the weather did not afford them the luxury of sleeping under the stars. You had to let people in. You had to feed a tenth of the farms and the orchards and the grapes all had to go to feed these strangers that would come into your village or your town from time to time and need a place to say and need something to eat. Yeah. And I guess one of the things about bread is he had gotten a hold of this yeast that was like 100 years old.

Yes. Yeah. And so he had started learning to make bread and with this yeast. And, you know, there's kind of a legacy to that yeast. Yes. And so that's kind of part of it. You always have that yeast as your base and you can make bread and then you always have food to share. And so it was really interesting. He told me all about it. And I was like, this is really cool. I had no idea. This was a thing. I thought you're just being weird. He was kind of weird guy, you know. He's kind of a nerdy, weird guy. But, you know, he's just kind of funky. He wouldn't explain things very well, obviously.

It's hard sometimes to say what you're thinking in a way that somebody who's not familiar with a concept can understand. Yeah, that's pretty much how I roll in the podcast. So you go through your generations from 1600 to 20, 24. How many total generations was this you covered in your family? So in my family, we went back seven generations. Oh, wow. On my husband's side, we went back four generations.

Because in the fifth generation, they were enslaved. And they did not have last names. They were not allowed to write legally. It was punishable by death for slaves to write in most states. So there wasn't as much that was what we have from his family is truly passed down from oral tradition. And our family, in about the 1700s, began writing things down and sharing them. We have journals and diaries and letters back and forth from people. that will be in a book in the future.

That is wonderful. Yeah. That is wonderful. You know, it's, and so what was the proponent that made you want to write all this down and the feature? We started, we had started bringing it together just before the pandemic. So in like late 2019, maybe, just as something that we were going to share at a family reunion. And then the pandemic happened. And we needed something to do.

So my son, who should be a chef, is a fabulous cook in the kitchen and helps out tremendously. we decided to try some of these recipes. And then we would have family Zoom once or twice a month. And we would talk to people and they would say, oh, try this one, try that one. And we began to amass this collection with stories that went along with some of them. One of the stories is about steelhead spread that my great-grandmother Shear shared with my brother. I'm too young to remember. But Grandma Shearer would walk wherever she needed to go to hitch a ride to go up into the mountains, above Mendocino County and fish for steelhead during steelhead season. And then she would come back.

She had a sleeping bag and whatever she needed was rolled up in that sleeping bag. She couldn't drive, as many women in her generation had not learned to drive. So she would just hitchhike. Everybody called her mom. She would catch a ride somewhere, catch a ride to the next place and go fish and come back with the steelhead and cook it on the barbecue, smash it up, stir it in some cream cheese with some little seasonings, and have it with a very nice California beer. Wow. That's something to be hungry. I know, right?

What you said, sour cream? You had me there. Yeah, yeah. I recently discovered sour cream is excellent on eggs. It is. 54 years of my life had been a complete lie, or 56 years of my life have been a complete lie of ever knowing that fact. He is amazing on many, many things. I mean, yeah, you can just eat it right out of the bowl, throw some jars in there. Smothered on.

yourself. So yeah. That's a different book too. That is a different book. You can find that on OnlyFans.com. Right. So anyway, folks, if you Google anything about me and OnlyFans, there's something wrong with you, people. See a psychiatrist. Anyway, no one wants to see that. Feast for Generations, you put this book out. What do you hope people come away with when they read it? A couple of things. One, of course, is to realize that no matter how different we think we are, we all have this similar common need to eat. And most of us, enjoy eating food that we like. Yeah.

And many people across the world have the exact same thing and call it something else. We had 15 recipes for berry cobblers, and there was very little difference in any of them. Some people would add two tablespoons of sugar. Some people would add three, but almost exactly the same thing. But with 15 different types of berries, depending on the region of the world or the states that they had come from. Same thing. Yeah.

And I hope, go ahead. You're making me hungry here. I know. That was the bad thing about it. When we were editing it, my son would say, oh, let's try this one again and try that one again. Oh, we better do that berry cobbler thing with four more kinds of berries. And so I weighed considerably less during the pandemic, but it finally caught up with me. Good food.

Good food will do that to you sometimes, you know? I did that. I wouldn't know that I was eating good food when I put on my weight, but not a fast food. Yeah, we did that too. Now, before we move to your next book, do we have anything covered there we want to talk about for Feast for Generations? Just that look at your own story, too. People don't realize how interesting your own legacy can be. And because of places like ancestry or 23 and Me, these different sites, you can go through that.

The Mormon Church shares all their stuff with anybody. And they have tremendous legacies for people of every nationality. every ethnicity, and you can go back and learn about yourself. Some things you won't want to know, some things you do want to know. Yeah, we used to do that at Thanksgiving dinners. Right, right. Thanksgiving dinners when I was a kid, but we don't do that anymore. Everyone's broken off in their own little family cults and some people don't get along.

Your family doesn't have to be who you were born to. That's true. You can choose a whole different set of people in the 20, first century. My husband and I love our family very dearly, but because people are busy, they have children and grandchildren, we have children living at home. It's hard sometimes to bring everybody together. Yeah. We have the billionaires on the show, ask them to adopt me. If that works out for you, send them my information as well. It's like, Chris, Chris, I'll call you. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So there we go. Now, the next book we

want to discuss was something called My Journey that's by you. And it's going to be published here on Amazon in a week or so. Yeah, in about a week or so. Okay. Give us an overview of that. So that started out with, it just talks about my childhood in Northern California in the 60s, different things we did, different people we meant. We had neighbors up the alleyway that were from Denmark who made tremendous bread, and they would trade their bread with my mother for vegetables from our garden. And so we talked a lot about that, talked about the things we did as kids because there weren't screens, there weren't phones, there wasn't, you know, YouTuber or the Chris Voss show to entertain us in the afternoon after school as children. We didn't even watch TV after school as children. Go outside and play. Come in when the streetlights on.

That kind of upbringing. And then I talk about why I joined the military. I talked about how line of duty injury took me out of the military much, much sooner than I had planned. and we had ended up stationed in Japan where our boys were born and how our second son nearly lost his life. And I go on through several chapters about that and how it's impacted us and how it's impacted him as an adult now. And I talk about how that injury in the military caused other problems that allowed the military to misdiagnose me with the mental health issue I didn't have and how I fought for years to get it changed from. bipolar disorder to post-traumatic stress disorder from the line of duty injury and the treatment afterwards. That would make sense, just logically.

I mean, a lot of people in the military, you get post-traumatic stress from all kinds of things. It doesn't have to be combat. But at the time that I was in, in the very early 80s, there still weren't very many women in, and we certainly were not allowed in combat. People looked at things differently. I think being in the military is very good. I think having a military is a good thing. I don't want to say that I don't.

even from my experience would happen to be negative at the end for me. I understand the importance of it, but you've got to change with times, just like society has to change. The military has to change, and they do about 50 years after society changes. They catch up. So I talk about that, and that kind of ends that book. It's more of a memoir than an autobiography because it's not quite long enough for me to call it that. But the most interesting part, I think, is when I talk about my son, and he received a medical overdose of medication from a surgeon during a very routine procedure. And now at 37, he uses a wheelchair for mobility.

He's classed as nonverbal, and he needs one-on-one assistance at all times. But because we were military, you can't sue anybody. So I talked about how we learned to use the system and how we learned to get support for him and how we made sure he had what he needs. needed, and we had what we needed as his parents, and his brother got some support as well. And that rolled me into an area of legislative advocacy. I taught high school for a year, and then ended up, like we had discussed earlier today, that I ended up working as a behavioral health supervisor and helping a lot of people, not only with what you read in the book in college, because sometimes that's great, sometimes it's not, but what I had learned as a human being,

being around other human beings who are just struggling to get by. Surviving is not always enough. We want to encourage people to be their best self so that the whole world can take a giant step forward in how we treat each other. Yeah. Why is that important to you in us trying to treat each other well? Why is that important to you and me? Why is it important to the rest of us to be able to? I think all of us have some point in our lives where we were not treated.

in a good way. Some people have endured horrendous child abuse. When my husband and I were dating in tech school, we were in an area of the state that would have had snow in the winter, so they had those double-dipped sidewalks so that the snow stayed on the road. And a car went up over the sidewalk and pushed us against a store window because they didn't like that he as a black man was walking through town with me as a white girl, and we were holding hands. Oh, wow. So, incidents, because I didn't grow up with prejudice, I didn't even, it didn't even occur to me, you know, that people would openly behave that way. I grew up in Northern California. You just, you know, whatever, kind of an attitude of life. And so, but I think everybody has

experienced something where they were made to feel less than. And when you feel that way for a long time, people get real angry and do really stupid things to get back at that person that wronged them 20, 30, 40 years ago. Yeah. So if we learn to get along now, you don't have to like everybody. You just accept that people have a right to be who they are as long as they're not harming anybody else. Yeah.

Hey, I wish more people would get that. Maybe we would be in some of those dire straits that we're in now in 2026 if people have that attitude. And so a good inspiration there. Let's talk about some of the other things that you do. I know we wanted to plug your artwork and a few other things. So I'm about the broad base of maybe the business and stuff that you offer there. So on my website, there will be a place for people to look at some of the artwork.

I do 3D art where I'll paint something and then add dimension to it. Sometimes with just like the thick paint that people do, the one behind me that people can barely see is got silk flowers in a basket that I painted. And the silk flowers are coming out and blooming. I've done some that light up that are like that. I do pictures of people. I can do portraits, but that's not really my thing. It's just pictures of people who more so could be anybody. Some of my favorite ones are drawing people as trees,

and then the lineage of the trees goes up into the branches, and you have different children or different pets. You know, there's a lot of parents out there these days. And the art also is an expression of myself. So in future books, I hope to do the artwork as well. I do book bags and tote bags and bookmarks, you know. I got to fill my time now that I retire. because my life was so busy and so hectic for so many years.

I don't sit still. Ah. You find you've always had that kind of, it seems like you got a lot of gumption. You're really active. Yeah. And being an active person or being an activist, because that's kind of where I got labeled, didn't used to be a good thing. Yeah. It used to be frowned upon, especially for women. And now that's how I categorize myself.

I'm an author. I'm an artist. I'm an activist. And I'm an educator because I hope to help other people find themselves so that they can be active in the areas of life that are important to them. You're spreading so much knowledge, wealth, entertainment, and education, and, you know, this is a great thing to do. And the rising tide lifts all boats. That's what I really believe. Absolutely.

Yeah. And it's just good for the world. Good for the world. It is. What else do we want to discuss or plug away at promote before we head off? So I, we talk about different ethnic groups in our books and we talk about people coming from different nations, but we don't use the category race, because race is actually a governmental construct that was designed to categorize people in a very negative way.

Could not allow other people to vote, so people could not allow other people to live on that street. And I think it's important when people look at who they are, that they don't get caught up in what color, skin, your ancestors were, or what nation they came from. But look at all those similarities and bring them together in yourself. And you might find a hobby that you never. knew existed before because your great-great-grandmother or grandfather wove baskets in trees, which was very common in Northern California by the Indians. That's how they kept their food

from freezing in the wintertime. So many things we can learn by learning about ourselves and learning about our neighbors if we don't get caught up on what people look like or what their address is, those kind of things that are just minutia to it all. Yeah, and the minutia. Yeah. And so as we go, we go. And so as we go. go out, give people a final pitch out to pick up your books, get to know you better, et cetera, et cetera. So my website is, my Facebook page, I apologize, is radiant journey through life, as is my Instagram. My publisher has me on visionary bookpublishers.com slash Rachel hyphen forward, backslash. And you can learn all about me. I'm going to set up an author page

on Amazon as well. The first book, A Feast for Generations is out electronically today. or yesterday and the other books will be out in paperback or hardback next week. All right then. Really exciting stuff you got going on. Did I have that count correct? Was it really 22 books or more? Yes, yes. And a number of them were curriculum.

So I would love to sell that because curriculum, you make a lot more money. I'll have to bring it up to speed and up to code because these changed after the pandemic. Yeah, they certainly did, didn't you? I love to write. I started when I was 12 in a confirmation class for the Methodist. church in Northern California. And we had to keep a journal about what we did and why we wanted to be better people. I've never stopped writing. That's good. We need to do that because I think asking yourself, how can I be a better person? Maybe focuses the mind on that direction, maybe.

And even before that, people can do a gratitude journal and just every night before you go to bed, write down three things you're grateful for because my sons are disabled, one because of his brain injury and one because of arthritis. I'm very thankful that I can walk. I'm very thankful that I can speak. I'm very thankful that I can make my own decisions about myself because not everybody in life has that luxury, some by disability and some by circumstance. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you put this work in and I'm glad we're getting the word out and stuff. You know, this is really important. We all need to lift each other. We all, we all are stewards. I often say we're all stewards of our democracy, but I should expand that to.

We're all stewards to each other and making the world a better place. And lifting, you know, there's, the rising tide lifts all boats. You can hear everything from abundance and there's plenty of abundance in the world or you can think of scarcity and, you know, you just become selfish and everything must be mine. And, you know, it's not, it's not healthy because we're all attached to each other. You know, I, you know, when you really think about how many people go into your day-to-day life, I just, this is kind of an epiphany on this just now. You know, I mean, there's probably hundreds of people that bring me my food every day,

that they're on the fields picking it and harvesting it, growing it, and then they bring it to me, you know, and my life seems simple because I'm like, I just drink this protein shake and have some eggs. And I'm self-sufficient. I hear people say that today on TikTok, and I just want to bitch-slapp them. I'm self-sufficient. I don't need anybody. And, you know, and you see that a lot,

maybe from our politics too, where we don't need certain people. And you're like, no, you do. We're a melting pot of a, you know, 7 billion people on this planet. Right. And we can all see that there are times where we don't get along and things don't go well for everybody usually. Right. And not even just a melting pot where we all want to come together as one, but a salad

where we all want to keep our individuality, but be better together. Yeah. We need to break more bread together. We do need to break more bread. Give me your dot coms as we go out and let everybody know where they can fund you. I'm Radiant Journey Through Life on Facebook and Instagram, and on my publisher's site, I'm visionary bookp publishers.com backslash Rachel-Faward backslash. And I'll soon have an Amazon author page. All right.

Thank you very much for coming the show. We really appreciate it there. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to my honest for tuning in. Pick up our first book and the other books that we talked about on the show. A Feast for Generation 1600 to 2024.

Thanks for mine for tuning in. go to Goodrease.com, Fortresschast, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortess, Chris Foss, 1 on the TikTokit, and all those crazy places in the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning, consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor, for any resulting brain bleed. All right, Rachel, great show.