Hendrik Varju is a cooking instructor who specializes in Mexican cuisine. While he lives near Toronto, Canada, his mother was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, so Hendrik spent his entire childhood cooking and eating authentic Mexican food. Hendrik now runs close to 100 cooking classes per year through his cooking instruction business called Passion for Food. Hendrik also specializes in hosting "Mexican Dinner Parties", which is, coincidentally, the name of his first cookbook.

A message from Hendrik:

When you buy a new cookbook and it has few pictures inside, I'm sure you're just as disappointed as I am. As they say, "pictures say a thousand words". Plus, let's face it; we eat with our eyes. I feel that photos of the various dishes in the book are necessary not only as inspiration for you to try the dishes in your kitchen, but also to tell you how each dish should look when plated. So I decided that this cookbook would have a photo of virtually every dish in the book. I only left out photos of a couple of salsa recipes because, frankly, most salsas look alike. In total, this book has 60 recipes in the menu sections and a couple more in the "Techniques Pages". All told, though, there are over 100 photos because many show you Mexican cooking techniques as well. Cookbooks with this many photos are very expensive to produce, but I hope you'll agree that the somewhat higher than usual cost is well worth it to have the extra guidance of clear photography.

This cookbook is not just about the recipes. It also teaches you some of the core Mexican cooking techniques that are common to many recipes. And since the recipes are organized into six elaborate dinner party menus, I've also included a "Strategy Page" for each menu that helps you keep things organized in preparation for a dinner party. These strategy pages tell you what you can do the day before the party and the morning of the party in order to get a head start. And they also tell you what should be done last minute in order for the food to be served at its best. Some readers will decide that putting on a dinner party with such a large menu is a little beyond their skill level. Feel free to divide up dinner party menus into something more manageable, perhaps offering just one appetizer instead of three. And, of course, you don't have to follow the dinner party format at all if you don't want to. You can simply use the recipes individually as in an ordinary cookbook. However, once you have achieved a higher level of confidence in your Mexican cooking you might decide to cook a full dinner party menu when a special occasion comes up. Enlist your friends and family to help you. After all, that is what this cookbook is about. It is meant to inspire you to enjoy food and cooking with the people you love.

You'll also notice from the front cover of the cookbook that over 95% of the recipes are "naturally" gluten free. What that means is that Mexican food very often just happens to be gluten free. So please don't fear that my recipes are not going to taste as good just because of this. I did not need to make drastic changes to recipes to make them this way. It just so happens that Mexican is one of the best cuisines in the world that uses little or no gluten. So for the gluten sensitive cooks and foodies of the world, you'll love this cookbook.

Varju, Hendrik