Chatting with cookbook author Bunny Crumpacker — now out with her seventh book, “How to Slice an Onion” (St. Martin’s Press, $25.99) — is like warm soup on a crisp autumn day.

Perhaps Garlic Soup, Page 69.

Even in print, the Valley Cottage writer’s voice soothes.

“Good things — thoughts, ideas, daydreams, premonitions — happen while you’re cutting the carrots,” she writes.

The book’s subtitle, “Cooking Basics and Beyond, Hundreds of Tips, Techniques, Recipes, Food Facts, and Folklore,” suggests it might be appropriate for someone just getting his or her bearings in the kitchen.

There’s a reason for that.

This book began life as a packet of pages Crumpacker wrote to help her just-out-of-college son Casey on his way in his first apartment.

“I wrote three chapters for him: The Onion, The Bird and Soup. I figured if he had those three, he could live,” she says. “And really all you need is the onion.”

Those chapters got polished through the years, and added to, but the central premise remains.

“It matters to do things easily and to do things with pleasure,” Crumpacker says. “And those two things go together. When you start getting complicated, very often you lose the pleasure.”

Cooking every day, she says, has taught her to do things easily and quickly.

“But it has to be good,” she adds. “You have to enjoy doing it, but you certainly have to enjoy eating it.”

Crumpacker serves up 303 pages of tips, quips and did-you-knows, from how to equip your kitchen to what you might choose to cook in it.

Recipes range from Fromage Fort (Or What to Do With Leftover Cheese) to Austrian Goulash and Four Ways to Have Berries and Cream.

She covers the title task concisely and then announces: “Now that you know how to slice an onion, you can slice anything.”

The tips, facts and folklore — Granny Smith of apple fame was Australian, buy tomatoes that smell “sharply tomatoey” — she learned through the years, jotted down or squirreled away on yellowing newsprint during several careers, from publishing to nursing to catering to school-district spokeswoman.

“I can tell whether it’s The Journal News or The Times by the type,” she says. “I have folders and piles of those clippings.”

Now she has a book full of them.

And she’ll sign copies of that book at two events this week: at Valley Cottage Library on Saturday and at Pickwick Book Shop on Sunday, during the Nyack Street Fair.

Her stress-free tone is refreshing in the age of “Top Chef,” “Hell’s Kitchen” and “The Next Food Network Star.”

At times, she apologizes for sounding motherly, as when she suggests you clean up as you go, to avoid a big mess at the end, when you’ll feel less like cleaning.

But there’s no guilt here.

“If you add too many carrots,” she writes at one point, “you’ll just have created a new version of what you were aiming for.”

If you go

What: Bunny Crumpacker signing copies of “How to Slice an Onion.”

Where and When: At 2 p.m. Saturday at Valley Cottage Library, 110 Route 303, Valley Cottage. Call 845-268-7700 to register. At 1 p.m. Sunday at Pickwick Book Shop, 8 S. Broadway, Nyack. 845-358-9126.

Journal News file photo