Live and Learn--Finally Published That Cookbook

Like I mentioned in my last post, way back like...yesterday, I think it was...I finally finally FINALLY did finish the Cookbook Project that I started, back in another life, which was supposed to be a graduation gift.  For our oldest daughter.  Who graduated in 2014.

So, yeah...  Goals and stuff.

She actually got married last April, AND our youngest daughter graduated high school in June, so I did get off my gimlit butt and get it finished.  I feel very adult and accomplished about this, and I was able to get my first several copies delivered into my hands in time to give it to both of them as a wedding and graduation gift, respectively.  Barely.  Like, the day of the wedding.

Since it's been so long, I'll tell you a little about the process; the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.

Upside:  It's gorgeous!  Hard cover, with a photo on the front, and beautiful heavyweight pages with beautiful photos, and there are all of our family's recipes, right there in one place, like I always dreamed of.  I absolutely love it!

Downside:  Program faults that make you want to create new curse words and write massive complaints to the program developers.

Let's call this Exhibit A.  I created and published my cookbook with a program called Blurb.  I believe it was a free download, through which you create your dream book, and simply pay for your book at the time it's published (we'll call that part...Exhibit B...)  *ahem* back to the program.  I love Blurb, except for one mind-blowing glitch, where you type too much text to fit in the first of two column text boxes on a page, and suddenly the overflow text disappears into a wrapped-text alternative universe.  Normally--normally--in a perfect world, the "wrapped text" feature (to me) implies that the text will automatically bump from the too-full text box into the next text box.  On the same page.  Because that would be WHERE IT BELONGS.

But, no.

Instead, the overflow text is sent literally pretty much into outer space, and it pops up in the NEXT AVAILABLE TEXT BOX ON ANY FOLLOWING PAGE THAT ISN'T ALREADY FULL.

Meaning?

Say I'm typing in Column 1 of page 10, and there are two empty columns ON that page.  I fill up Column 1 and expect the wrapping to automatically put the overflow text into Column 2, the empty column right next to Column 1 on the same page.  No.  Instead, I find that the overflow text, and a good portion of the prior sentence, have been slashed off the page entirely and have popped up on, say, PAGE 23, at the beginning of Column 1 on THAT page.  Which in turn causes all the existing text on page 23 to go wonky and out of order, and possibly cause some innocent bystander to be cooking an omelet and wondering why the first line of the recipe says "fold in dry ingredients, add cinnamon, nutmeg, and baking powder; beat until stiff peaks form, then drop one inch apart onto a greased cookie sheet" or some such nonsense.

What makes it even more fun, is that the carryover location is not easy to find, so you're left sorting out "Where did it go?" and "How much text is incorrectly pasted on the front end of the recipe on the recipient page?"  Seriously.  I think I actually created new phrases and/or some interpretive dance to adequately describe how this fun feature really made me feel.

Aside from that, I loved Blurb.

Oh, and there was that nagging little issue about copyright photos, which meant that I originally went through the book, pasting in gorgeous pictures of recipes and food that I found online here and there *cough*  Google images *cough*, that were perfect representations of my food--as long as they looked exactly like my dishes.  Then, of course, (silly me) I realized that the photos would have to BELONG to me, in order to go in the book written BY ME, so that sucked, and I spent some more time interpretive dancing around my office before deleting all the "not-mine" photos, and starting over, by actually cooking some (but not all) of the recipes in the book and remembering to take a photo for the book each time.

So, that was another hold-up...for like a year...

Aside from that, I loved Blurb.

Oh wait, Exhibit B.  Yes.  Pricing...

*clears throat and shuffles some papers around*

You know when you think about writing a book, and then it's like, "Hey, cool, I'll have a book published, and people can then hopefully BUY the book, and then everyone can use my recipes and I might actually make a little money and the world will be a better place in general."  Yeah...that's not how it really works, with Blurb anyway.

How it really works is, you decide how you want the book laid out and choose all the expensive paper and binding and layout before you start working on the design, and then you work on it for like ten thousand years, and then hit the "publish my book" button, and THEN you realize that it's charged by the page (212 pages), PER book.  So-- my book, finished, hardbound and delivered...cost like $96.00.  EACH. 

Each?

I paid almost $100 each for the first two copies of my own book.  Well, someone's making money.

Yes, there's an option for an e-book to be available and people could buy it for like $10, but I hate e-books a little bit so I haven't chosen that as an option for publication, yet.  And there's an option to sell it on Amazon and set my own markup percentage, but honestly even as a paperback, they charge $74.00 each, so where is there room for markup?  Really? A $74.00 paperback?

Friends:  "OMG I love your cooking.  I would totally buy your cookbook! How much is it?"

Me:  "Uhh, $86.95 plus shipping".

Friends:   *nothing*

Hear that?.... That's the sound of profitability crashing and burning.

So, yeah.  It's not for sale, although I did score a sale on a purchase the week after I ordered my first two copies, where it was on sale plus a BOGO or something and I got two copies for like $126.00.  But dang.

Anyway.  YES I did get the book done, and it's beautiful.  But NO, it's not for public consumption.  Even Martha Herself doesn't charge $85.00 for a book.  I mean, come on...

Say Anything

I know, if you can't say something nice...  but what if you can't say something interesting?

Just say anything, I guess.

my whole weekend so far--

I'd say something interesting, but I'm not into baring my soul to the world at large, especially when my "world at large" includes...pretty much everyone I know.  I mean, I'd possibly be more comfortable if I didn't know most of you, because who cares what strangers think, right? ME

And I'd try to say something funny, but I think all my funny is used up for now, and that would also require concentration and making words fit together, which is a skill I seem to have depleted lately.  This also explains why I have several tabs open on my computer right now that are unfinished things that need to be finished before lunch and it's 11:48 a.m.  And I just remember I have a 1:30 chiropractic appointment, and I haven't showered yet...

So, that explains my state of mind today.  Hey, I did say something, right there...

Since it's Good Friday and a special holiday weekend for us, and I don't have any deep thoughts about candy flavors or shoes or tips for driving, dressing, or using Facebook, and I'm out of fun family stories, I thought I'd just share our weekend menu ideas here, instead of on Pinterest.  Because everyone knows Pinterest is where entire days of nonrefundable time go to die.

This is also a shout out to any of my vegan friends, because our youngest has been more or less vegan for about 6 weeks, and I'm trying to create dishes she can or will eat, while still including the dyed-in-the-wool dishes we always eat.  And, since butter, cream, wheat and meat are very central to our special occasion meals, I'm somewhat stumped.  I go completely all Paula Deen for holiday meals.  BECAUSE BUTTER Y'ALL.

For some reason, I also haven't started on any of our food yet.  Not like I haven't started baking yet...like, I haven't even been to the grocery store yet.  Which also means tomorrow I will be in the kitchen freaking out going WHY DIDN'T I START ALL THIS ON WEDNESDAY??

Procrastinating.  Procrastinating is why I didn't start all this on Wednesday.  That, and a lot of knitting.  And my nails are wet.  And because DOG.    It's a busy life, OK?

Without further ado, here's the bar I've set for my holiday Martha/Paula alter ego this weekend.  Bearing in mind that it's just the three of us...so, picture SMALL amounts of everything, except I'm also trying to use up about about 7 dozen extra eggs from our chickens, who must have heard our youngest's new vegan rule and decided they had something to prove.

Homemade hand-dipped chocolates with coconut and peanut-butter
Homemade peeps.  ain't nobody got time for that
Iced sugar cookies  (and by "iced", I mean, I may take a butter knife to them with some icing on it)
Angel food cake with raspberry-current preserves from the garden
Breakfast crepes with apricot preserves
Organic ham from our own pigs
Steamed asparagus (we grow it, but Lord knows it's sure not ready YET, because we live in Narnia)
Homemade pickles
Mashed potatoes
Spinach salad with feta, dried cranberries, almonds and raspberry vinaigrette
  OR - pea salad, because spring
Paska - Ukrainian Easter bread
Creme caramel (and no, we don't have a milk cow.  I heard that.)
Hard-boiled eggs (did I even need to say that?)

*ponders a moment*

Yeah....Not much of this ties in with our vegan OR  plant-based, wheat-free diet idea.  *shrugs*

Have a beautiful weekend!  Hopefully next time I'll have something more interesting to say.

 Feel free to chime in if you have vegan substitutions that non-vegans would also love...

I'm Turning into My Mom. Only With Less Wheat Germ

If you read the prior post, you know that we are trying to incorporate more of a whole foods and plant-based diet approach to our life.  No, we aren't going all full vegetarian or strict vegan or anything.  Which is good, because since writing that, we've still had some form of meat on the table pretty much every.single.night, BUT AT LEAST THERE ARE LOTS OF VEGETABLES on the plates too, right?  And when I say "meat", I mean our own, homegrown, organic pork and beef, raised by us and our family at home, so it's not all processed, store bought stuff.  And I can't not cook it, because 1) that'd be wasteful, and 2) we love meat.

This might be harder than I thought...but any improvement is a step in the right direction.  I will say there's probably no way stroganoff or meatloaf are coming off the menu.  Just sayin'.

Plus, we have this amazing garden, so it's not like it's a stretch to eat tons of fresh, organic produce as often as we can, (sometimes by the wheelbarrow load)...I just need some more creative ways to make vegetables more of a "main dish" rather than a side dish (no offense, Martha, but I'm branching out).

After a point, you just GIVE UP on the weeds...

The other side of the walkway, mid-August

I did actually order the Forks Over Knives cookbook, which should be here tomorrow, but we went to Barnes and Noble the other night in a blizzard because--BOOKS you guys! OMG, booooookkkks!  (My e-reader is awesome, but--I love real books.)  So of course I bought two history books ("The Plantagenets" and "Queens Consorts"--my favorite history-geek topics), and an absolutely visually stunning hardback cookbook called "Vegeterranean" (Italian vegetarian cooking), which is amazing and lovely to look through; I can't wait to cook from it.  And I love that it doesn't require a bunch of hard-to-find ingredients that I will never buy, let alone eat.

The best thing  I found, though, is "Back to Eden".  This is super cool, because just the other day, after writing a whole memory of my childhood where my mom spent a year trying really hard to make us be vegetarians (which didn't work), I remembered that she always had this book called "Back to Eden".  And then...there it was, right there on the shelf at Barnes and Noble.  Of course I grabbed it.  Reading it feels like coming home.  No wonder we never went to a doctor...

My birthday, with my dad, my aunt, mom, and my uncle, mid-70s.  Not sure why there are two cakes?  Or what is hanging from the ceiling...

I may have frowned a lot at her food choices for us as kids (all those lunches of home-made whole wheat sandwiches, cookies full of nuts, and garbanzo beans in the meatloaf), but the older I get, the more I believe:  Moms really do know best.  Especially now that I'm a mom.  (Right, kids??      Kids?)

A New Direction...but not Fanatically

Nothing huge.  We are just deciding to adhere to a more whole foods, plant-based diet, starting now.

I can't quite get my mouth to say the word "vegan", because I'll never be a true vegan in the sense of "I don't consume anysinglethingthatevercame from an animal.  I love a great steak.  I love chicken.  I love bacon.  Cheese.  Butter.  Eggs.  (Not giving up cheese or eggs--and I'm not apologizing for that either.  Fight the fights you can win, people.)

We have always gardened and tried to raise as much of our own food as possible, and we have been gradually phasing out the additive-full, processed products from our pantry and fridge, because we know it's the healthy thing to do...as hard as it is!  Whole wheat bread, raw honey, lots of fresh veggies, etc.  But it's time to commit to it more strongly, for our health.

So.

I just bought a vegetarian/vegan cookbook, and our family is going to take the next step towards greatly limiting our meat and dairy consumption, for our health.  Gradually, though.

I'll never be one of those all militant vegetarians who announces to everyone, everywhere, within the first few minutes of meeting someone, that "I'm a vegetarian.  I don't eat animal products.  Did I mention I'm vegan?" Everyone just wants to slap them (*hint hint* vegans...), but I love my family, and if this will help us live longer and avoid heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and the high cholesterol that runs in our family, then so be it.

Pray for us. We have a freezer full of COW and two pigs, right now...and we are a "meat and taters" kind of family, even if they are organically grown, so even though it's the right health choice, I'm having a hard time convincing myself that oh sure, I can learn to love kale...

Ummm.    Ok

I'll keep you posted.

Cookbook Wishes and Carb-Laden Dreams

(You have to read the title with Robin Leach's accent, or it won't work.)

I've been spending most of this month (other than keeping busy and fulfilled working on taxes and laundry and dishes and feeding chickens and vacuuming and reading and painting my nails and more laundry and dishes and basketball games), working on the as-yet unnamed cookbook project that I undertook last year, which I have elegantly and creatively named: The Cookbook Project. 

I can't seem to come up with a name--at all--so, if you have any ideas for a cookbook other than "The Book" or "Stef's Big Book of Recipes for People Who Can't Cook Good", I'd love to hear them.  My creativity doesn't work that way very well.

It's slower going than I expected, but I've got a system for entering recipes that is working, and it's coming together.  I have about 200 pages already, and I'm *cough* not.even.close to finished, and I keep remembering more recipes to include, so I'm hoping it doesn't turn into like 900 pages of "WHAT? WHY IS THIS SO BIG?!?" and end up costing a million dollars to publish.

And it's making me hungry, plus it's making me want to bake.  So today, I worked on the book, but only after making a lemon meringue pie AND some New York rye bread.  I haven't had wheat since before Christmas, but I tried a piece of that bread just out of spite.  I mean, you can't not eat it, when it's hot out of the oven.  What if there's something wrong with it?  I need to know, right?  RIGHT??

And it's turning out that everyone we know is still waiting for a copy or two.  My deadline of May to have it finished *feels* realistic, but it's a little nerve-wracking because I still need to go through and somehow make sure the proof-reading is right, so no one ends up making something and realizing that...shouldn't there be SUGAR in this cookie recipe? 

Originally it was SUPPOSED to be just a gift for my girls, so they would have every single family favorite recipe that we love, all in one place.  But it turns out, since I love to cook, and I've been cooking and baking for a long time, there are, um...a LOT of recipes to add.  Which means lots of typing.  Or lots of time scanning and then cutting, pasting, editing, correcting and cursing.  I had one recipe that I tried to scan, cut, and paste that took me so long yesterday that I started feeling all restless and irritable and jumpy, especially knowing that I could have TYPED this recipe directly already, like, 48 TIMES.  WTH??  Sometimes technology just--gets in the way.

Anyhoo.

It's also slow going because my wrists and hands are kind of sore, because I haven't spent this much time typing since my 200+ wpm medical transcriptionist days, so obviously the last thing I feel like doing is writing blog posts.  Plus...none of my stories have formulated into blog-worthy cohesion in my head yet, which is my own highly developed way of knowing when I feel like writing one down--I start telling myself the story, in my head, and if it...feels...like I should write it down, I do.  It's all very highly evolved and sophisticated.  *snort*

Also, everytime I look up a recipe that has pictures, especially the ones I haven't made in a long time--suddenly I'm craving all of them.  So, now, on top of working out and dieting, I have visions of almond puffs dancing in my head!

And sourdough bagels!!



And caramel-raisin cinnamon rolls with extra gooey sauce!!!

 Ahhhhh, carbs!!!  It's like a torture test of willpower.  This from a woman who could live on wheat and dairy products and nothing else.  I have never craved a carrot stick in my entire life.   not.  once.

aieeeeeee

Just needed to get that off my chest.

Carry on with whatever you were doing. 



Ever start a project that makes you crave food you should not be eating? 

Cooking with My Mom

I have been cooking with my mom, well, for pretty much EVER.  She taught me, from the time I had to stand on a kitchen chair at the counter, up to my first cake entry at a little county fair (which won Best in Fair and got me a HUGE purple rosette), and we still cook together when she visits.  She is an amazing cook who has "been there and done that" in terms of the restaurant/food business.  She has run a lunch and sweet shop that became locally famous for her bagels and hand-dipped truffles; a restaurant that became famous for her scratch pizza and sourdough pancakes (seriously, ONE is enough, sir; they're 10" in diameter), and supplied homemade desserts for a New Jersey restaurant in the early 70's. 

At the Jersey shore with my mom; one of my favorite pics ever.

On one of her last visits, Mom reminded me about how she used to keep me occupied by turning on 'Sesame Street', back when it was a "new" show on TV, while she baked pies at home for the restaurant in New Jersey, so I guess I've been with her in the kitchen for a longer time than I remember.

When she's here, we still spend a lot of our time in the kitchen. In fact, usually we run out of days to make *all* the things we wanted to bake, and the conversations sound like this:

Her:  So, what should we do for dinner tonight?

Me:  Let's do homemade potato pierogi.  We haven't made those yet!  With Polish sausage and saurkraut.

Her:  What about borscht?

Me: That too. And flat bread. And babka! We forgot the chocolate babka!

Her:  There wasn't time. We were too busy making the butter cookies and gingerbread. Enough with the carbs, already.

Me:  We also totally haven't made homemade marshmallows yet.

Her:  I leave tomorrow, remember?

And so on...

This summer she's coming for a longer stay than her last holiday visit, and since I've started putting everything we love into ONEcookbook for our family, I can already tell we're going to be having variations of this conversation a lot.

You Should Write a Cookbook, They Said...

This past week I finally started putting together a project that has been in the concept stage forever. 

I've always baked and cooked, and my mom has always baked and cooked.  It seems like between the two of us, we are always baking or cooking, for ourselves or others.  In my case, this got way way out of hand after someone said: you could totally sell cakes, but that's another story.  The project I have been thinking about forever, though, is a cookbook.  I'm finally not spending everywakingmoment meeting with brides, their moms, their fiancés, their best friends, their children and their bridal parties (Hi, we're here for the wedding cake tasting.  Yes, there are 9 of us). I'm also not constantly at a bakery or up late at night designing, sketching, baking, and creating edible works of art, like turning this sketch...

Into this cake:

When I have free time like this, my mind turns to projects; hence, the idea of a cookbook.

I'm not saying I'm going to whip up a bunch of NEW recipes and call a publisher or anything, but with the combined total of like a thousand years of cooking experience in our family, I thought it'd be a wonderful gift to my two girls as future graduates, wives and mothers, to compile a book with all of our family's favorite recipes in one place.

This will also be a great gift to myself, so I can skip the endless flipping through book after book, muttering, "Criminy! WHICH book has our favorite gingerbread recipe?!?"  This will be a one-stop collection drawn from my many cookbooks, 4x6 note cards,  my Polish grandmother, my mom, my years in the wedding cake industry, magazine tear-outs, etc.  If you've ever eaten at our house or attended a wedding with one of my cakes, you have an idea what it will contain.  So far everyone who's heard about this project, wants a copy, which is sweet but is so not what I had in mind.  (No pressure there; now it has to be Really Perfect).

Not that you won't be able to maybe snag a copy someday, for a price, but I am nowhere near that point yet, so don't get all excited. 

After talking about it as an idea for probably 2 years now, I finally started working on it this past week.  I actually downloaded what seemed like a very cool self-publishing book program from online, (which shall remain nameless) chose the book size and general chapter titles, and wrote a brief introduction (which will, no doubt, go Long).  I started  with their automatically formatted 'recipe' pages, which seemed AWEsome at first.  Right away I ran into a glitch with their automatic, nonoptional text "bleed" feature, where you can be typing blithely along in a text box on a 2-column page, reach the bottom of the column, and you assume (why not?) that the bleed of the text will carry into the next column. On the same page. 

For some reason, however, this is NOT where your overflow text ends up.  At first, it's not apparent where it ends up, only that there is an "Issue" and that it has been "Fixed".  If you've typed enough of the overflow text or aren't paying attention, you will suddenly realize that you are typing on a whole new page, somewhere Out There in the book, but you are definitely no longer on the same page.

After most of a day spent doing a lot of cut-and-pasting, deleting, undoing, and some major cursing, plus a near all-out I am SO not doing this, I figured out the text bleed thing.  Somehow it bleeds, not onto the same page, (where it belongs) but into the next available blank text box, *usually* the next page.  Wth??  I can only assume that, if the next page were already full, then this random bleed function could also technically put your continuation of "Aunt Lillian's Coconut Easter Eggs" on a page in the Meat chapter, and then Easter's screwed and the BBQ has a funny 'tropical' flare.  But I digress…

Long story not much shorter, I turned it all off for awhile and considered my options (quit, find another program, or figure this out), and decided that I DO want to have this book done in my children's lifetime, so I took a break, turned it back on, and dove in.

So far, I'm pretty happy with the progress I'm making.  It's been a surprisingly slow process, trying to figure out the best way to add recipes:  book by book, and jump around all through my chapters, adding recipes? Or chapter by chapter, sorting through 30 different books for ALL my favorite chicken recipes at once?  I've settled on book by book, mostly because having ALL the cookbooks I own sitting on the coffee table is making the living room look like a major hoarder lives here.  See? 

Not cool…Now there's nowhere to put your feet.

I'm prepared for this whole book-writing thing to take a long time, because there's also still the whole issue of adding photos.  Occasionally I've taken pictures of cool things I've cooked at home, which ususally turn out like this:

(I know, pretty awesome composition, huh?)

Since snapping pro-quality pictures of food at home is not an everyday thing for me, there's an obvious problem here.  Almost every photo I've tried to add have returned an "Issue" with resolution, which the program wants to "fix" by resizing the image to like a 1 x 1" square.  That's totally not what I have in mind, since most really awesome cookbooks usually have glossy full-page photos and could double as a coffee-table book.   I tested it using some of the pro cake pictures I have from wedding photo shoots that were published in print and online, to see if they would work in this program, but even THOSE seem to be not good enough (really??).   Plus, I can't just put wedding cake pictures on every page of a cookbook.

(This says nothing about Marsala Chicken, to me. Even my kids would see through that. Cake chapter photo, though? yes, maybe.)

I haven't figured out how to solve this problem yet, so for now I'm going to focus on just getting the recipes added to the book, leave the formatted spots for photos along the way, and hope to figure it out before it's all done.  Then I will sell it to everyone on the planet and become a billionaire with my own TV show, radio show, cable show, books, magazines, and product line in every major box store, muahahahahaha.

If it's worth doing, it's worth flying by the seat of your pants, is what I always say...or was that Martha?