A 159-page cookbook by Imogen Bailey. Seasonal recipes designed for more than one set of hands — and an invitation to gather, cook, and remember what kitchens are for.
Instant digital delivery. 159 pages · PDF + companion webapp · priced in USD
When I think about the kitchen, I don't think about appliances or shopping lists. I think about women.
I think about the women I have stood beside at stoves over the last twenty years — at gatherings, at long Sunday lunches, at celebrations, in the small Circles I have run from my own home. I think about the kind of conversation that only happens when both your hands are busy and the food is taking its time.
There is a particular magic that lives in a kitchen full of women. It is not loud. It is not curated. It is the magic of three or four pairs of hands moving around a single pot.
This is one of the oldest forms of connection we have, and most of us have very quietly let it slip away. This book is my attempt to put a little of it back where it belongs.
It is a cookbook, first and foremost. The recipes are real, the meals are good, the food is the point. But it is also an invitation — to slow down, to share the chopping, to look up from the cutting board and notice who is standing beside you.
— Imogen
Each recipe is built for company. Gentle roles share the work. Small Connection Invitations give the conversation somewhere to go.
The story behind the book. Why we gather, why we stopped, and the small returning that's possible at any stove.
Spring through winter. Each recipe assigns gentle roles — Story Holder, Flavor Alchemist, Fire Keeper, Root Weaver — so the meal is made together and nobody is left alone in the kitchen.
Meals for celebrations, gentle rituals, and quiet weeknights with the women you want to know more deeply. Conversation prompts built into the cooking.
Tap any page to read it. This is what makes Kitchen Circles unlike any other cookbook on your shelf:
Forty recipes. One hundred and fifty-nine pages. Every one of them built to be cooked together.
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The recipes don't come from one kitchen. They come from women across continents who have been gathering this way for years.
"The recipes are simple. What surprised me was how much the kitchen changed when I started using the roles."
"I used to cook alone for people. Now I cook with them. It is the same meal and a completely different evening."
"This book gave me permission to stop performing in my own kitchen. Friends notice."
My name is Imogen Bailey, and the cookbook in your hands is one of the most personal things I have made.
I am a women's Circle facilitator and the founder of Honouring Heart. I am a birth and end-of-life doula, a meditation teacher, and a Reiki practitioner. Most of all I am a student of gathering — of what makes a room feel safe enough that the real conversation begins.
I came to this work through twenty years in television. What I noticed, slowly, was that the spaces I felt most alive in were the quiet ones — evenings around a friend's table, weekends stirring on a stove while women I loved talked openly beside me, late afternoons in the small Circles I run from my own home.
I made this cookbook because the kitchen, in the end, is where most of it begins.
Choose a recipe. Message two or three women you'd like to know more deeply. Cook it together. Let the kitchen become a Circle without ever announcing itself as one.
Get Kitchen Circles — $19.95 USDInstant digital delivery · 159 pages · PDF + companion webapp