For the Love of Apricots: Recipes and Memories of the Santa Clara Valley
Jun 21, 2019
Lisa Prince Newman
For the Love of Apricots: Recipes and Memories of the Santa Clara Valley

Lisa grew up in Saratoga, where her parents raised four children, some horses, chickens, and the occasional raccoon on a large property. Their home was surrounded by a productive fruit orchard that was a remnant from a historic ranch. Her mother maintained the orchard, myriad other fruit trees, and a large vegetable garden. Before Silicon Valley had been imagined, orchards stretched in all directions. Witnessing the orchard landscape being plowed under for suburban development made a deep impression on Lisa, as did the growing environmental movement of the 1970s. She studied Land Resources Planning at Stanford and received a Masters Degree in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. While pursuing a career in city planning in the North Bay, Lisa also developed her culinary education. Lisa nurtures her family and friends through her own garden and fruit trees, inspired by a vision of sustainable growth and change. Recently, Lisa brought these two themes together in a Cookbook/Memoir, For the Love of Apricots: Recipes and Memories of the Santa Clara Valley.

Lisa was a Rotary International Fellow between college and grad school. The Chico Rotary Club sponsored her application and Lisa's husband joined for the year. She studied Scandinavian Urban Planning and Norwegian at the University of Oslo and became pretty fluent in Norwegian. This was before women were invited to join Rotary. It was a wonderful, life-changing experience!