“Look at you 1960s Tampa!”, I thought when I first saw this newspaper clipping of Jackie O rocking The Gasparilla Cookbook, “look at you…”.  It was 90 percent this photo and 10 percent my love for cooking that drove me to select the Cookbook Special Events Coordinator as my top placement in The Junior League of Tampa this year.  So you can imagine my excitement when I found out that the cookbook committee’s current focus was on the 50th Anniversary Edition of this very book.

On Saturday, we held our first event which celebrated the special edition anniversary reprint while honoring the past 60 years of cookbook committee chairs.  If this room had a head and a toe, it would have been decorated from one to the other in Gasparilla gear.

Gasparilla decorations in August = happiness for a Tampa crowd!

Our committee baked timeless Tampa recipes that perhaps Jackie O herself had prepared at one time or another.  And a fact like that, one that can neither be proven nor disproven, is one that I will kindly convince myself is truth!