La Limone

Phoenix entrepreneur Joanna Palmer, featured on Bravo’s “Below Deck” in April, has just published a culinary memoir and cookbook that prove the best chapters of a woman’s life have no expiry date.

Viewers of a recent “Below Deck” episode on Bravo met Joanna Palmer the way Joanna Palmer tends to be met: at a table, with strong opinions about the food. The Phoenix-based entrepreneur, grandmother, and birthday girl was a standout guest on the episode, celebrating on the island of Canouan with her daughter Shanel, her husband Wes, and close friends – requesting a leopard-inspired birthday dinner, and what happened was the crew surprised her with a dance performance in her honor.

What the episode didn’t have time to tell you is that Palmer has just published two books: “La Limone: Recipes and Stories From a Life Well Zested”, a culinary memoir, and “La Limone Kitchen Cookbook: Recipes From a Life Well-Zested”, its companion cookbook.

The timing is not a coincidence. It is, as Palmer might say, a life well zested.

La Limone: Recipes and Stories From a Life Well Zested” is a culinary memoir built around a simple but quietly radical idea: that a woman, like a lemon tree, only gets richer and more interesting with age. It is the story of Palmer’s six decades – from a working-class childhood in Winnipeg where she started working at ten and her parents slept on a pull-out couch in the living room, through a passionate first marriage into an Italian family who argued loudly and cooked everything from scratch, through divorce and single motherhood, and a chance meeting at a friend’s wedding that brought her Wes – together with whom she built businesses into a national enterprise – and on to the lemon trees she now grows in her Phoenix backyard.

The lemon pasta the “Below Deck” chef prepared in her honor? Exactly the kind of dish that fills the pages of her companion cookbook, “La Limone Kitchen” – 60-plus lemon-forward recipes carrying the same warmth, boldness, and refusal to settle for mediocre that Palmer herself brings to everything.

“She’s always in the kitchen and she’ll tell the chefs what they can do better,” Shanel tells the camera this week. “She’s not really tolerant with mediocre food.”