I have been incredibly productive these first four days of my vacation, and I just can't believe how much stuff I've gotten done . . . but I also can't believe how many movies I've watched so far! I believe I told you about Christine's and my shopping adventures Saturday . . . and my tag-along shopping adventures with Ann on Sunday. I've taken care of laundry and a mountain of dishes and a few other miscellaneous errands, (including taking Marie's Christmas gift to the post office -- watch for it, dearest!), and have officially begun work on the cookbook I've been talking about writing for ages now.
The cookbook is a little difficult to describe . . . it's mostly about why and how young/single people should/can cook healthfully for themselves. I have written the introductory chapter, (which, even after two edits on my part, is still 6 pages long. I think I need to cut it further, although I attempt to set up the reasoning behind creation of the cookbook, as well as explain my loose interpretation of healthful eating practices,) and the "Plan of Attack" chapter, where I give advice on kitchen hardware and software, grocery shopping, and meal planning. I have also chosen the recipes to be included in the following chapters: "Daily Bread," "The MOST IMPORTANT meal of your day," "Sack it," "Snacks -- your new best friend," "Mom, what's for dinner?", and "A treat a day keeps the psychologist away?" I, however, have a LOT of recipe tweaking, formulation, and testing to accomplish now. (I think this part will take me months and months and months.) Since I don't want to plagiarize and many of the recipes have come from magazines, cookbooks, or websites, I need to tweak them significantly in order to make them my own. I also need to make things I've made up again and carefully document measurements. And I'd like to include Nutrition Facts for each recipe, and I hear you can find calculators for these kinds of things on the internet. Sheesh.
I also need a title.
And eventually, I'll need recipe testers. Let me know if you'd be interested in helping with this. Once I get a recipe looking and feeling the way I want it to look and feel, I'm going to need family and friends to test these and make sure the ingredients are easy enough to find, the directions make sense, and everything is consistent.
I also need a publisher, eventually. Anyone know someone who works in the publishing business?
Wish me luck. Who knows if I'll ever get to the point where I want to publish this, let alone find someone who's interested enough in this idea to print up a few copies. But it's worth a shot, right?
1 comment:
One suggestion: make sure it is spiral-bound or whatever it is they do to cookbooks, just so it doesn't have a regular binding. I hate it when you have to lay something on the cookbook to keep the pages open. >:-S I usually end up using something I've already used while cooking, then my pages get sticky... It sucks. :) Other than that, I think it's a fabulous idea!!!
Post a Comment