Christmas book

Now that the Christmas anthology is all decided and I saw the recipe for the lady finger cake, I started thinking.

What about a collection of stories that includes one recipe per story - EASY recipe. I do know that formatting a recipe book is tricky. I remember I read a book once that had a poem in every chapter - it was fun to look forward to the poem.

Just a thought. Could be a different anthology for all times - or not at all. Just a thought after seeing that great recipe and knowing just about everyone has their secret recipe.

Like the time I had a big deal dinner party for which a friend was bringing desert. She arrived with cake mixes, sticks of butter, cans of cherries and a tub of ice cream. I was furious.

She poured the bing cherries and juice in the bottom of the glass caserole. She crumbled the two boxes of cake mix (white cake mix) evenly over the cherries. She sliced pats of butter around the top and put the mess in the oven until the cherries, cake mix and butter bubbled, candied on top and browned a little.

For desert, we had hot cherry cobler with rich vanilla ice cream. No one remembered years later what the entree was, but everyone remembered the desert!

11/21/2009

DK....
Your making my mouth water ! I used to make
another great desert " Creme De Caramel " It takes
forever take 11 yolks, 1 egg , half & half....But I think
your on to something , Each story could have a recipe
with it , very good idea , where's Shelagh, let's get her
in on this !

Cheers..Joe...

Hi Joe,

There is nothing wrong with the idea except for the difficulty of marketing a recipe book. Books by celebrity chefs dominate the market.

However, I think it was Ann who recommended the film Julie and Julia to DK. The film was based on Julie Powell's blog: http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/. I am considering putting all the interviews on the Visual Arts Junction blog into an e-book (that could be printed as a small book) for promotional use by the authors I interviewed on the blog.

If a recipe blog could be set up inviting visitors to submit their own recipes, each with a short story of the successes and disasters they have experienced using the recipes for special occasions, the blog posts could be put together in book format.

I produced a very small publication called Nana's Kitchen a few years ago, just for my family - my children and slew of cousins. It contained all of Mom's recipes that were family favorites. I included pictures of her kitchens, dining rooms, family members and guests that had been taken over the years during family gatherings, holidays and casual dinners. Mom sort of commanded the family from her kitchen.

I started with a software program called Living Cookbook, by Radium Technologies which allowed me to organize the publication and export it to microsoft word, creating a table of contents and index. I just printed the pages and put them in sheet protectors in a loose leaf binder, but today there are more programs for creating pdf files available.

This page shows a demo of how it works:

http://www.livingcookbook.com/product/movies/publish.aspx

After I exported the basic cookbook, I edited in the family photos and some text for each recipe, telling a little bit about the photos and the gatherings where they were taken.

Ann

Ann,

That sounds like a fantastic book!!

Carol

Thanks, Carol. I recommend the program to anyone who is considering publishing a cookbook. As DK said, the formatting can be difficult. This program takes care of that.

Ann

11/22/2009

I think the Christmas book should stay the
way we intended it and create a seperate
Special Recipe book ... But my recipes are
from others not mine, so I don't think I can
use any of them...

Cheers..Joe

Shelagh has a good idea to start a blog. We can add as we wish and someday turn it into a book. Or we could just do a recipe plus story thread here. The stories in this case would be from small to whatever. If a recipe is passed down; we say just that. I have another story and another recipe for key lime pie, sailor's version.

1/2 cup fresh squeezed key lime juice; one small can sweetened condensed milk. Whip in juice and allow to set. Dip into created custard with vanilla wafers or other similar cookie. Voila! Sailor's key lime pie without the stuff that needs refrigeration or cooking. Of course, after the "pie" is made, it must be fully eaten.

I had a party on Lady Ace, and friends were bringing desert. I knew they had no refrigeration; so when I saw the key lime custard and a box of wafers, I had my doubts. It is really delicious. If you don't have key lime, lemon will do.

DK,

If you set up a blog on Wordpress.com, you can invite friends/colleagues to become administrators. These administrators could collect recipes/stories from friends on Myspace/Facebook and post these recipes onto the blog. In six months time you might have enough material to put into a book.

I lost the word file for the cookbook when my hard drive crashed a few years ago, but here are parts of a couple of pages from my copy that I was able to scan:

This early page has pictures from the late 40's

...And this later page, from the mid 80's (note that Feagin and James are still sitting at her kitchen table - different kitchen; everybody's a little older.)



Nita is Feagin's youngest daughter.


Ann

In both of my novels, I put recipes at the start of a few chapters. The recipes revolved around the title/theme of the novel. In the first book--The Madhatter's Guide to Chocolate-- the recipes were chocolate. In the second book--Up the Devil's Belly--I used "hot" recipes.

Seemed to go over well with the readers. They enjoyed the novels and the recipes. Plus, they made many of the recipes and shared them at book club meetings.

(which meant I got to eat them, too)

Ann, what a terrific book - and I like the recipes in the novels. Learning something new......

Thanks for the blog idea, Shelagh - just don't have the energy to get it going past the idea stage yet.....

The recipes in the novel remind me of Like Water for Chocolate, and there is a fascinating book called Cane River about an African American woman in Louisiana - I can't remember the name of the author - a collection of vignettes based on historical information an ancestor found.

I have considered using some of the old recipes that my grandmothers used in Ailcy's Legacy.

Ann