"Every story and every memory from my childhood is attached to food," Dawn Lerman writes. Our relationship with food starts at a very young age: what and how we eat is often determined by our environment and our upbringing. Our eating habits and tastes are cultivated by our family members’ relationships to food, for better or worse. Dawn knows this first hand. The author of the New York Times Well Blog series, "My Fat Dad," shares her food journey and that of her father, a brilliant copywriter from the "Mad Men" era of advertising at Leo Burnett and McCann Erickson, in her new book, MY FAT DAD: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Family, with Recipes (Berkeley; September 29, 2015; Trade Paperback/$16.00).

Dawn spent her early childhood in Chicago constantly hungry as her ad man father—responsible for such iconic slogans such as "Fly the Friendly Skies," "Coke is It," and "Leggo My Eggo"—pursued endless fad diets from Atkins to Pritikin. At 450 pounds at his heaviest, he insisted Dawn and her mother adopt to his saccharine-laced, freeze-dried food plans to help keep him on track.

"As far back as I can remember, there was an invisible wall that separated me from my dad, a distance that I could never completely penetrate," Dawn remembers. "His closest relationship was with the bathroom scale – his first stop every morning and his last stop every evening. The scale controlled his moods, our days, what we were going to eat and basically ruled our family life."

Dawn’s mother never cooked and she witnessed her mother eat only one real meal a day—a can of tuna over the kitchen sink—while she dashed from audition to audition pursuing an acting career.

Dawn felt undernourished both physically and emotionally except for one saving grace: the loving attention she received from her grandmother, Beauty. Dawn spent every weekend with Beauty, and their time together instilled in Dawn a passion for cooking for oneself and others as she learned that the best food is prepared with the freshest ingredients. When she was with Beauty, Dawn learned to enjoy the adventure of picking out vegetables for supper, and spent hours precisely rolling out dough for the perfect strudel.

When Dawn’s father took a prestigious new ad job in New York City with McCann Erickson when she was nine, Beauty’s culinary education continued as she sent Dawn a recipe card every week with a twenty-dollar bill. Beauty’s recipe cards became Dawn’s life-line as she navigated Manhattan on her own.

When McCann Erickson suggested Dawn’s father spend six months at a Fat Farm in North Carolina in order to get a promotion, ten-year-old Dawn accompanied him for a summer. When they returned she tried to help him maintain his 175-pound weight loss by cooking her grandmother’s recipe cards with a healthy twist. From macrobiotics pie, to salmon with fennel and leeks (learned while spending a summer at Duke’s Fat Farm with her father), to Beauty’s family recipes, Dawn reflects on her colorful family and how food shaped her connections to those she loved.

MY FAT DAD is as much a coming of age memoir as it is a recipe collection from Dawn’s upbringing and culinary adventures in Manhattan. Her recipes include some of her grandmother’s favorite traditional Jewish dishes, to healthier interpretations and creations. Some of the recipes found in the book include:

Her father’s life-long struggle with food, along with her grandmother’s love of cooking fresh foods, led Dawn to become a well-respected nutritionist and NY Times blogger. Today her dad is a healthy 230 pounds and vegan.

Dawn believes that "everyone has a food story to tell. My Fat Dad is mine."

Dawn Lerman is a board-certified nutrition expert, founder of Magnificent Mommies and contributor to the New York Times Well Blog. Her company Magnificent Mommies provides nutrition education to student, teachers and corporation. Dawn counsels clients on weight loss, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other diet-related conditions. She is a sought-after speaker and consultant and lives in New York with her two children.

For more information about Dawn, go to www.DawnLerman.net.

This holiday season try these recipes, two of Dawn's favorites from her book.

Berkley Books/September 2015

In the words of my grandmother Beauty, "Good food is not fast. Fast food is not good and if you know how to make a pot of chicken soup, you can nourish yourself for life."

When I was growing up we never had real food in our house. My 450-pound ad man father only consumed diet products with a marketing promise attached. My mom, a liberated women of the 60's and a wanna-be actress had no interest in cooking or domestic chores. I was always hungry both physically and emotionally except for the weekends I spent with my grandmother Beauty. Arriving at her home, I was transformed by the warmth of the air, and the aroma of her soup. It was in her kitchen, inhaling the dill and biting into the soft matzo balls, swimming in stock, sweetened by parsnips and carrots that I felt what true love and nourishment was. It was where my tears were dried.

This hearty soup can be served as a first course or as a meal. It is loaded with body from the chunks of vegetables and the rich broth. Beauty never strained her broth, giving it a robust, complex flavor. "I can find my heritage in a bowl of soup," she often exclaimed, as we enjoyed spoonful after spoonful.

32 ounces water (plus 10 more cups to add as the broth absorbs)

1 (3½-pound) chicken, cut into 8 pieces, most of the skin removed

4 medium carrots, peeled and cut into ¼-inch pieces

4 ribs celery, cut into ¼-inch pieces

2 medium parsnips, peeled and cut into ¼-inch pieces

1 large sweet potato, peeled and cubed

1 medium yellow onion, quartered

Handful of fresh dill, chopped

Kosher salt and pepper to taste

Garlic powder or a couple of cloves of fresh garlic, to taste

Place the 32 ounces of cold water in an 8-quart stockpot set over high heat and bring to a boil. Add the chicken and cook until foam comes to the top. Spoon off the foam, reduce the heat, and add the carrots, celery, parsnips, sweet potato, onion, and dill. Simmer the soup for at least 2 hours and add the 10 cups of cold water, 1 cup at a time, as needed. As the soup cooks, the liquid will evaporate and the soup will thicken.

Check the soup every 30 minutes to remove any film that rises to the top. Stir in the salt, pepper, and garlic powder to taste, and remove the pot from the heat. Remove the chicken and the vegetables from the soup, and pull the chicken meat off the bones. Ladle the broth into bowls and add the desired amount of chicken and vegetables to each bowl.

Yield: 8–10, depending on the size of the balls

4 eggs

1 cup matzo meal

Salt and pepper to taste

½ teaspoon baking powder

2 tablespoons schmaltz

¼ cup club soda

Beat eggs. Fold in the matzo meal, salt, and baking powder. Mix in the schmaltz and club soda. The mixture should be moist. Refrigerate for 1 hour. The consistency should look like wet porridge. Wet hands and form into small balls. Drop into boiling chicken broth. Cover and cook for 20 minutes

* Note: To make your own schmaltz, just scrape off the fat that rises to the surface of stock. You will see an obvious layer of it after refrigerating the broth overnight—it becomes solid when it’s cold.

Beauty knew my father was always dieting and eating "food-like" products instead of real food, and this upset her because she knew that during the week, when I was home with my parents, this was the food they would give me. "Food needs to have a delicious, fresh taste and smell," she would tell me, and she would always make me smell and taste things to guess the ingredients, whether it was vanilla in cookies, strawberries in freshly baked muffins, or dill in a barrel of pickles. "It needs to be made in nature and not in a factory."

3 eggs, beaten

1 cup granulated sugar

1cup butter, softened, or vegetable oil

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups all-purpose flour

4 tablespoons poppy seeds

1 teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

Parchment paper for rolling out the dough and lining the baking sheet

1 egg yolk thinned with 2 tablespoons of water for a thin egg wash

In a large bowl beat the eggs and sugar with an electric mixer until the mixture is a light yellow color. Continue beating while adding the softened butter (or vegetable oil) and vanilla. Mix well.

Combine the remaining dry ingredients in a bowl and with a fork mix so that the poppy seeds are evenly distributed throughout. Then add the dry ingredients into the egg mixture until the dough just comes together. Form it in a ball and roll out the dough between 2 parchment papers about an inch thick. Place on a sheet pan and refrigerate the dough till until it hardens, about 20 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Take the dough out of the fridge and peel off the parchment paper. Cut into desired shapes using a knife or pizza cutter. Place squares on the prepared baking sheet and brush on the egg wash. Bake in the middle of the oven for 10 to 12 minutes, or until slightly puffed and golden.

Cool on a wire rack. The cookies will harden as they cool