Don’t try to label The Iberian Table as one genre. Robin Keuneke’s book, focusing on the Spanish Mediterranean diet, is part cookbook, part guide to healthy eating, and part travel guide, with a healthy dose of memoir along the way.

“I freed myself to fuse culture, culinary, health, and recipes, a book that would feel sensory,” says Keuneke, formerly the food editor for Total Health Magazine. “I want the reader to join me—on a mountaintop, at a green market, or inside a cave. To accomplish this, I welcomed the reader to get to know me.”

The result? A book that Kirkus Reviews calls “a thoroughly sumptuous guide to some of the world’s most nutritious cuisines.”

Keuneke lives in Delray Beach, Florida, but is planning a move back to Atlanta, where she grew up. Initially, she thought she wanted to be an actor, but she discovered she lacked the courage to be on stage and turned to what might be called the family business. “I grew up painting in a family of artists,” Keuneke says.

Her painting took her to New York. Her art is in public collections (including the New York City Public Library), and she has had exhibits in New York and London. “During all that time, I’ve always been passionate about cooking,” Keuneke says. That love led her to study at the Macrobiotic Center of New York, as well as at the Natural Gourmet Institute.

At the Macrobiotic Center, she worked with people fighting cancer and other illnesses by changing their diets, which led to her teaching in her home kitchen once she and her husband moved to Connecticut. “My life’s path [has been] connected to health, and I started teaching cooking and developed a little booklet for my students that featured foods that were protective,” she says. “My recipes are really, I think, my greatest art.”

That connection to healthy cooking—which simmered in her grandmother’s kitchen and boiled over with her love of farmers markets in New York—culminated with her first two books, Total Breast Health: The Power Food Solution for Protection and Wellness and The Detox Revolution: A Powerful New Program for Boosting Your Body’s Ability to Fight Cancer & Other Diseases (co-authored with Dr. Thomas J. Slaga). Total Breast Health was named one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of the year in 1998.

When Total Breast Health came out, Keuneke says, it stood out for its macrobiotic subject matter. “I found these foods that were protective, for men and women, and I sold 25,000 copies of that book,” she says. “It was basically recipes featuring foods like cruciferous vegetables and soy…and why you should eat tempeh instead of tofu.”

Keuneke’s husband, Thomas, would travel the world to go to conferences for his job. She would often go along, and together they’d explore cuisines of the region. “We would…get in a car and get a map and just drive [through the countryside],” she recalls. “So I got to see Europe not as a tourist with other Americans. It was an adventure, and getting lost was the best thing to do.”

Around 1980, they took their first trip to Spain, which eventually led to The Iberian Table. “When I got to Spain, I…couldn’t believe it, and I just kept going back,” Keuneke says. “The food was the freshest farm-to-table food that I had ever experienced. It was…incredible.”

Keuneke soon found herself eating that northern Spanish cuisine even after she returned home. “It was just natural for me to prepare these dishes that we had when we were there. Sometimes, if [an ingredient] wasn’t easy to get, it would be my version of the recipe.”

She began researching and writing The Iberian Table in earnest about a decade ago, deciding on it instead of the update of Total Breast Health she had planned. “The book that I needed to write was already in front of me, and it was about Spain,” she says. “So on a plane ride home from one of our trips, I started to write it.”

The Iberian Table, which Keuneke calls her “life’s work in nutrition,” focuses on the northern region of Spain and its use of olive oils, healthy fats, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables—fresh and organic ingredients. The book is filled with recipes, including Majorcan farmer’s breakfast salad, Basque mushroom ragout with egg yolk sauce, lamb meatballs with currants and green olives, and pa amb tomaquet.

The book includes interviews with chefs Carme Ruscalleda and Elena Arzak, but it’s Keuneke’s personal stories that really distinguish The Iberian Table from the rest of the cookbook pack. For instance, here’s a bit from Keuneke’s Spanish travels:

In Ganbara, a popular pintxos bar in Donostia, I have seen mushrooms so large they were practically the size of footballs. The forager of these “Alice in Wonderland” beauties was an older guy wearing a neck scarf and hat, with the brim upturned. He stood with stylish nonchalance amidst a crowd of devotees, accepting congratulations as though he were a rock star. Later I would discover that those giant mushrooms were Boletus aereus, and the caps sometimes reach a diameter of sixteen inches. They are highly prized, not just in Ganbara, but throughout the Basque country and Navarra.

Or this, from a trip to a Spanish market:

Now we arrive at a large stall offering an extensive selection of seeds and nuts. It is one of the most crowded all day, a testament that this food is wildly popular here. Nuts, an important component of the Mediterranean diet, are used in the cooking of Catalunya in endless ways. We see a couple of teenagers sharing almonds from a small bag. I see they are Marcona almonds. I must have some.

The breadth and depth of The Iberian Table, going beyond being solely a cookbook, is something Keuneke admires in other writers. She cites Patience Gray, M.F.K. Fisher, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Paula Wolfert, Richard Olney, and Colman Andrews among her influences.

Keuneke knew early on that The Iberian Table would be a work that would span genres, especially after advice from her husband and a friend who often traveled with them. “They both said, ‘Just be completely free and write a memoir—people will want to know about you; just don’t be shy or fettered by anything,’” the author says. “And that wasn’t my instinct, but that’s what I did. I was just free and expressive throughout the book.…It’s a unique kind of a genre. It’s all intertwined.”

Though The Iberian Table gives readers a glimpse of Keuneke and her travels, in the end it is about the healthy food of northern Spain.

“This diet is so effective,” she says. “It’s not just a diet; it’s a way of life.”

Keuneke is still painting, and the vibrant colors she uses in her work tie directly into the culinary side of her. “It’s important for my cooking to be vivid, too,” she says. “And that’s the thing about the Spanish way of cooking. Their flavors are so bold, and I just love that. And the history of their foods just mesmerizes me. It’s all so fascinating.…I hope readers will get how accessible it is to upgrade their health with this diet.”

Alec Harvey is a freelance writer based in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a former president of the Society for Features Journalism.