To be welcomed into the home of Andrea Hunter Halgrimson is to enjoy the ultimate food experience. Her large kitchen with navy blue accents is just the type of cozy workspace Halgrimson needs to prepare her creative concoctions. Herbs, plants, jars of spices and cans of old-fashioned Café du Monde are arranged around the counters.

And of course there are cookbooks—more than 2,000 of them. Bookshelves are a fixture in every room of Halgrimson’s house in Fargo, N.D., and they are dominated by cooking books, books about food and reference books about food.

If you are so lucky as to be invited over for lunch, perhaps Halgrimson would make you a hearty omelet, served with salad, pumpkin bread, fresh strawberries and black coffee, Café du Monde of course. She makes a delightful salad, tossed with a homemade dressing of walnuts, walnut oil, lemon oil and Gorgonzola.

Halgrimson usually keeps two different kinds of homemade soup in her large navy blue refrigerator, one of which is often lentil soup. And despite the amount of cooking that occurs in her kitchen, her oven is as clean and shiny as a brand new model. Her partner, Sam Bernstein, takes the oven racks to Breadsmith in Fargo to clean them using the store’s professional tools.

Not only does Halgrimson cook, but she also teaches cooking classes and writes about her craft.

It all started with the classic “The Joy of Cooking.” Halgrimson has six versions of the cookbook, which sparked her interested and started what is now a massive collection. Although Halgrimson worked in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother while growing up, it wasn’t until she attended college at North Dakota State University in Fargo, that her own joy of cooking blossomed.

Halgrimson keeps her different versions of “The Joy of Cooking” on one of the many bookshelves in her warmly lit basement—those bookshelves were built specifically to accommodate her cookbooks. A few of her prized recipes come from “The Joy of Cooking.” For example, she cooks the book’s tomato aspic with gelatin and vegetables during the holidays. Avgolemono, a Greek lemon-based soup, is another old favorite.

“This cookbook was just a revelation to me,” she said. “And then of course, Julia Child came along.”

Another early cookbook from Halgrimson’s library is “Great Dinners” by former New York Times food critic and editor Craig Claiborne. Halgrimson continues to cook Claiborne’s steak au poivre recipe for houseguests. She also enjoys books by Harvey Levenstein, such as “Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America” and “Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet.”

For 32 years, Halgrimson worked as a newspaper librarian at The Forum in Fargo. Her hard work organizing clippings and archives eventually allowed her the opportunity to share her food ideas with the community. In 1987, she started writing a weekly food column, which she continued until recently when she cut down to two columns per month. Her columns cover a wide variety of topics, and she is focusing more on history columns.

Halgrimson’s columns follow the seasons. For example, she usually writes about herbs in the spring and fall. Also, she makes a point to use products available in the Red River Valley so recipes are accessible to everyone in the area.

Halgrimson is passionate about quality ingredients, particularly fresh homemade bread. Her favorite place to buy bread is Breadsmith in Fargo, whose slogan is “Hand Made. Hearth Baked.” The staff at Breadsmith uses practices similar to those of French bakers. She loves their Rosemary Ciabatta and Brioche. The store offers a wide variety of bread selections, including Austrian Pumpernickel, Blueberry Cornbread and Honey Sunflower Whole Wheat. She said Breadsmith is the next best place to buy bread, second only to ethnic bakeries in big cities.

Halgrimson has doled out such advice and more by teaching in a variety of settings, including adult education at her own home in Fargo. She gained such a good reputation that people had to put their names on a list in order to get into her classes.

“People would hire me to cook in their homes,” she said.

Halgrimson welcomes opportunities for sharing her knowledge and skills. This spring, Halgrimson volunteered to speak at the Fourth Annual Gardening Seminar at Heritage Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead. She talked about eating and cooking herbs and flowers that grow in the Red River Valley.

Moreover, her passion helps the community. A six-course dinner for 10 people cooked by Halgrimson sold for a whopping $3,000 at this year’s Festival of Wreaths fundraiser auction for the Roger Maris Cancer Center.

Fargo-Moorhead is the community in which Halgrimson has lived her whole life. “I love North Dakota with a deep passion,” she said.

And she was determined to show author Bernard Clayton just how it’s done in North Dakota. Clayton, who has written more than 20 books, tracked down Halgrimson to be featured in “Cooking Across America.” The book showcases more than 100 cooks and 250 recipes.

However, when the time came for Halgrimson to cook a meal for Clayton, the chicken caught on fire on the balcony. Then Halgrimson’s profile and recipes show up in the book under the section Fargo, South Dakota, not North Dakota. However, some tasty recipes are now available as a result of that meal. The chapter on Halgrimson includes Toasted Sunflower Seed Bread and Chocolate Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Glaze.

Halgrimson is especially fond of chocolate. Her favorite source is Belgian Callebaut chocolate. Her license plate is proof enough: CHOCOL8. In one of her columns for The Forum, she writes: “Of course, it is my belief that there are few things in this world that do not go with chocolate. Broccoli perhaps.”

In “Cooking Across America,” Clayton describes Halgrimson as “outspoken about things she likes and outspoken about things she doesn’t,” which couldn’t be more true. Her down-to-earth attitude adds engaging warmth to her personality.

Although her roots are in Fargo, N.D., Halgrimson has done a great deal of traveling. Each place she visits influences her cooking in the methods and the details.

One place is particularly special to Halgrimson—Provence, France. She spent one week there in 1980 and another week in 1981 learning the art of French cooking from Simone Beck at her farmhouse. Halgrimson said Beck’s home was like a vineyard. “The only other place I think I could live is Provence. There’s something that speaks to me there.”

Beck wrote “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” with Julia Child and Louisette Bertholle, which includes recipes such as La Boeuf a la Bourguignonne (a beef stew in red wine with bacon, onions and mushrooms). The three women later opened a cooking school called L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes.

In class on Fridays, they cooked crepes. “Invariably, one would end up on the floor,” she said, adding that Beck’s small dog Iota snatched them up and ate them. “That was his treat on Fridays.”

Halgrimson said one of Beck’s cookbooks is a favorite. “It looks so appealing. It tells stories about the people she cooks for,” she said.

Although she hasn’t been to Norway or Italy, both places also affect her taste. Halgrimson’s grandmother cooked traditional Norwegian dishes when she was young. Later, by unusual means, southern Italian food became a staple in her household.

Halgrimson’s father, G. Wilson Hunter, was a well-known obstetrician and gynecologist for many years. One of her father’s patients while he was in New York introduced him to Italian food. A woman named Luisa, who owned an Italian restaurant, came to Hunter for help when she discovered her husband had stabbed her lover. In return for patching up her paramour, Luisa cooked Italian dishes for Hunter.

When Hunter’s wife, Phyllis, saw how much he loved Luisa’s cooking, she picked up a couple small cookbooks to teach herself how to cook Italian food. Phyllis cooked dishes such as biscuit tortoni, veal Parmesan, lasagna and pizza.

“She made lasagna and pizza long before people here had ever heard of pizza,” Halgrimson said.

Other cookbooks come to her as birthday gifts, such as the one a friend bought in Zaire. “It’s a petit bijou (little jewel) of a cookbook. It’s a real treasure,” she said. For those of Halgrimson’s friends who can’t travel to Africa, cookbooks tend to appear at thrift stores. Laura Shapiro’s “Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America and Perfection Salad,” both about cooking in the 1950s, came from thrift stores.

It turns out Bernstein shares in his partner’s fascination with the culinary arts. He made his own cookbook as a child, which now sits on a nightstand in the couple’s bedroom. Teal swirls and flowers decorate the cover, the paper is yellowed, and sauce splatters show up on the occasional page. Weinmachts Striezel and Hot Garlic Brown Rice are two of the recipes in Bernstein’s cookbook.

“He makes a beautiful baklava,” Halgrimson said of Bernstein. And what about his Spanish flan, made with cream and egg yolk? “It is to die for.”

“We always argue when we’re in the kitchen together,” Halgrimson said.

In all the ways cuisine has added to her life, perhaps the most important is its ability to provide fun and diversion. Unfortunately, Halgrimson has endured tragedy and difficulty throughout her life, including two bouts with cancer. However, her outlook remains bright. Cooking, learning about cooking, reading about cooking and writing about cooking all help enrich her life.

“I feel like I’ve been on borrowed time for so many years,” she said. “I’m going to do what I enjoy doing.” And she does it with a spectacular flair.