Who wants to bring an e-reader into the kitchen, anyway? I mean, I’m sure some

Copyright: Williams-Sonoma

people do, but then you run the risk of getting food on it, of equipment getting tossed on it, and you don’t have those beautiful glossy photos looking up at you. It’s not the same giving someone an e-cookbook for Christmas (“Here, sweetie. Here’s the link to download your very own version of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Merry Christmas! And someone’s birthday is coming up. Be on the lookout for Anthony Bourdain’s LeHalles Cookbook in your inbox!”). Frankly, it’s hard to get excited about a recipe when it’s coming off a flat, boring screen. The most beautiful part of a cookbook is the book itself.

Regardless of your opinion on the matter, the fact is that cookbooks are still going strong in the print market, especially with the growing trend of paper-over-board covers, which is a hardcover book with a photo printed right on the cover, rather than a dustjacket. Read a Publisher’s Weekly article for more information. And I’d love to know what you all think.

Viva la cookbook!

Seriously?

If you’ve stopped by before, you know I’ve written many times about traveling and eating.  Last week, I said that for a foodie, traveling is not just about visiting historical sites and such, but it’s a also a culinary adventure. That was amusingly proven to me this week.

A friend of mine visited me from Idaho this week. When I found out that she wanted to come to New York to attend an event, I offered to put her up. Well, the first thing she said (after “yes”) was, “I’m dying for a cannoli.” Well, how could I not laugh? I mean, of all things, a cannoli? And that’s all I heard for the next few weeks. Cannoli.

The fact of the matter is, you can’t get everything everywhere. You have to go to certain places to get certain things. That’s nothing new—we all know that. But when someone visits your neck of the woods, it really serves as a reminder that we shouldn’t take the things we enjoy for granted. You all in the South serve up legendary barbecue.  Maryland is known for the best crab cakes in the country. Roasted green chiles rule supreme in New Mexico. And why would you get peach pie from anywhere but Georgia?

Where Italian specialties are concerned, I grew up surrounded by them, and although the Italian community in Brooklyn is not as vast as it once was, it’s still not that difficult to get the things that have always been a part of my life (we’ll see how much longer that lasts). Now, back to the cannoli.

I knew right away where I would send her for one. I jotted down some information about things to do while she was here, how to get there, and directions to the bakery where she would get her longed-for cannoli. But did she listen to me? Noooo. Instead, she went to Park Slope and got a cannoli from a Chinese bakery. There are two things wrong with that:  She bought it outside of the Italian neighborhoods and… need I explain the other thing? The cannoli was so awful that she gave it to the birds.

The next day, she stopped at the bakery I told her to go to…and had the best cannoli she’d ever had. She even got tips from a local patron about the kinds of pastries she should try (“You should really try a lobster tail.”). Anyway, she enjoyed the cannoli so much that she bought half a dozen to bring back to her kids the next day. First, though, this box of cannoli took a trip across the Brooklyn Bridge in my friend’s backpack. Fortunately, it was cool enough that spoilage was not a concern. The real concern was if they’d survived the sojourn. They did. There was only one casualty. But the real test was whether they would make it all the way back to Idaho, through four airports and much jostling. Apparently, they made it. And whatever damage there may have been, it didn’t matter—I got word that every last crumb and dollop of cream was devoured.

For those of you who don’t know what a cannoli is, it’s a pastry dough shell shaped into a tube and filled with cream. Special cannoli tubes are used to shape the shells and, traditionally, the shells are deep-fried in lard; however, very hot oil is sometimes used instead.  The cream is usually cannoli cream, made with ricotta, sugar, and maybe vanilla extract, and you’ll often find candied fruit or chocolate chips in them. Sometimes the shell is coated in chocolate, too. The final touches on cannoli can be powdered sugar,  maraschino cherries, chocolate chips, or nothing at all. For anyone who’s interested at trying their hand at making them, there’s a recipe in my cookbook, What, No Meat?

Anyway, my point is, when you go somewhere, seek out the local specialties because as much as global commerce and cuisine have pervaded, the best of something can usually only be had in one place or region. And I’m always on the lookout for the best. And always listen to the locals when they tell you where the best is. They know what they’re talking about.

Until next week, have a healthy and happy week.

Shari Warren print, available at allpostersc.om (http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Cannoli-Posters_i1107150_.htm)

What, No Meat? Traditional Italian Cooking the Vegetarian Way

It was a lot of work but it’s finally done. Now comes the task of marketing. It’s not a task I’m fond of, but it’s a necessary evil.

Anyway, if you’re interested in a copy, it’s available from the publisher HERE or at any online (and possibly a few brick-and-mortar) booksellers. Of those, I personally recommend Barnes & Noble, not Amazon (they’re the evil empire).  BUT, if you order from Bedazzled’s bookstore, Book Peddler, you can get 5% off the order. Just put the code NOMEAT in the Redemption Code box at checkout. E-books are 10% off.

Okay, off to celebrate. Have a wonderful week!

Part of my problem is that I only know the basics of InDesign. When I was working at Travel Agent Magazine, I had to use it, but only for content edits and minor formatting changes. I learned as I went, and there wasn’t any time to learn more than I absolutely had to. Plus, it’s been over a year since I’ve done even that much in InDesign. I had to first re-acquaint myself with the program and figure other things out. Fortunately, I’m skilled in QuarkXPress, so it’s not like I don’t know anything about layout programs at all. But Quark is different from InDesign.

Anyway, it’s taking me forever because I’m doing everything–checking layout, proofing content, correcting layout, correcting content, then I have to redo the Index, table of contents, and check all cross-referenced material throughout the book. I’m totally experiencing deja vu because I already did all of this. But here I am, doing it all again. I’m so grateful that I have someone helping me proof the copy. That’s taking plenty off my plate.

In the meantime, everything else is on hold. Work on my second cookbook, work on my novel and short stories, and the floor needs a good sweeping. I did, however, manage to do a few loads of laundry. I had no choice. I’m going  to be on the road starting Sunday and I need clean clothes.

So, I’m going back to the task at hand. I’m hoping that by next week, I’ll be able to tell you that everything went fabulously and my beautiful new cookbook will be available soon.

I’m sick of the snow, and I’m sure you are, too. So, I’m going to wish you all an end to winter, a quick leap into spring, and a wonderful week ahead.

Hang loose.

Compounding the problem of lost Christmas sales is the fact that they probably won’t be made up next Christmas. The publishing industry is a funny machine wherein timing is everything.  In order to make decent Christmas sales, you have to release a book a few months prior to Christmas (around September), but no earlier than that, to create the right “Hey, here’s a brand new book on the market” buzz. In other words, a book that comes out between January and August are already old by Christmas. That’s not to say that they won’t sell at all. After all, publishers and authors alike hope that a book will have a long shelf life and a nice cookbook can sell as gifts for years to come.

What I’m talking about is the BIG sales spike on a newly released book, which affects the rest of the life of the book. Within a year, a book—any book—is considered “backlist”; that is, books that are still in print and available but are no longer actively promoted or pushed by the publisher. It’s kind of like when you buy a new computer with the latest technology, but your old computer still works, so you put it in the basement or the guest room and every now and then you turn it on to do something. But for the most part, you’ve forgotten it. That old computer has been backlisted. Fortunately, unlike computers, which become completely obsolete after a few years, books can have a long, healthy life in Backlistland and continue to sell very well. But unless the author is famous or something occurs that draws unexpected attention to the book, chances are you’ll not get a sales spike quite like the one you got (hopefully) when the book was initially released.

At any rate, I’m going through the proof now and it’s taking a while. A cookbook is a complex thing with many different elements that have to come together a certain way. There are lots of little things that require correcting (I suppose that it doesn’t help that I’m extremely anal and a stickler for consistency). Cookbooks are very visual, which is why books with color photos sell better than others. But photos are very expensive to print and not all publishers can afford to do that. That’s where illustrations come in. They break up the text and help readers visualize the recipes and ingredients. But even illustrations are expensive. And because I originally self-published this book, cost was even more of a factor. I was also lucky to have a very good friend, Linda, who’s an artist and did my illustrations for free.

Layout for easy reading is important, too. People should be able to bring their eyes back and forth to a page in a cookbook and easily find where they last left off. And the instructions should be easy to read. I dislike books with “run-on recipes”—recipes that just follow one another on the same page—because it makes it confusing sometimes. However, paper costs money and I myself had to do some run-on recipes when I self-published this book. But cookbook designers try to avoid that, if possible. The only cookbook I own that has run-on recipes and very little in the way of illustrations is Marcella Hazan’s The Essentials of Italian Cooking. But Hazan is an Italian cooking legend and she could write a cookbook on a roll of toilet paper and it would sell.

Moving on to the next project, I FINALLY finished the testing on my second cookbook. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. There are still a few recipes that I decided need one more run in the test kitchen. But the bulk of the testing is done and I’m not on this bullet train of daily testing anymore. I felt like I was doing nothing else, day after day. Alicia Silverstone came out with a vegetarian cookbook recently called The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet, and Vegetarian Times interviewed her about it. She said that she was basically on lockdown in her house for 12 days testing the recipes. Now, I don’t know how she did proper testing for an entire cookbook in just 12 days, but it illustrates my point just the same: Developing and testing recipes for a cookbook is a laborious, time-consuming task. I started this second book in 2002. Can you believe that? Eight years in the making, and who knows how many thousands of dollars for ingredients. Well, phase 1 is over. Now on to phase 2: Trying to sell it to a publisher. That’s going to be the hard part. I still have this whole “platform” problem. More on that another time.

For someone who doesn’t have a job, I seem to be awfully busy, which is a good thing but it makes me wonder how I got anything done when I was working. How does anyone get anything done when they’re working? I’m going to try really hard to get through a long list of things to do this weekend and, hopefully, get in some exercise. It’s going to be fairly nice before another winter storm moves in. Sigh.

By the way, did you check out the photo of that old cookbook above? It was printed in 1747 and written by Hannah Glasse, but is attributed to “A Lady.” I love old cookbooks. They really are an insight to what life was like for the common woman. And reading through some of the recipes in pre-Fannie Farmer cookbooks, it’s amazing they were able to follow any at all and get it right.

Anyway, that’s enough for me. Hope you all have a great week!

Anyway, on with the show.

This week,  I want to talk about appetizers. It’s a pretty broad subject, I know, but they’ve been a part of my daily existence for the past year. Allow me to explain.

My next cookbook is going to focus on appetizers, so almost every day I have been testing at least one appetizer. The thing is, when you’re testing a recipe, you have to test it exactly as it’s going to appear in the final recipe, including ingredients and quantities. In other words, if you’re developing a recipe for turkey chili with red beans and zucchini (yeah, zucchini.  so?), you can’t substitute pork and chick peas in the testing and then use cauliflower because they were out of zucchini at the market. Everything cooks up differently, at different times, with different results. You won’t know what your end product will be and that could cause dissatisfaction in your readers. Your recipes must work as written. Where quantities are concerned, again, you need to use the same quantities as stated in the ingredients list of the recipe, otherwise, you may end up with a different yield. So, your readers might be expecting 4 servings and end up with only 3, or 10. And not all recipes are amenable to being doubled or halved.

Why is this a problem for me? Because if I’m developing a recipe for appetizers, it’s going to be for at least 6 people. Appetizers can be fun and delicious, but I must say, one can only eat so many appetizers. It’s gotten so that I’m sick of my own food. I give away a lot of food. A lot. The other night, I asked a friend if he’d like to go get Chinese food. I couldn’t stand the thought of eating my own food again. I was already cooking a couple of things that night, mind you, but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat them. I finished cooking, packed it all up, and went out.

Don’t get me wrong. My food isn’t bad. In fact, if my family and friends are to be believed (not to mention my personal chef clients), I’m pretty good at this cooking thing. But sometimes I just need someone else’s food.

Anyway, back to appetizers. Appetizers have existed since ancient times. Here’s what I wrote about appetizers—or antipasti in Italian—in my cookbook, What, No Meat?:

One of the trademarks of an Italian meal is the antipasto (appetizers or hors d’oeuvres). Contrary to popular belief, antipasto does not mean “before the pasta.” It means “before the meal.” Pasto (meal) comes from the Latin word pastus, meaning “food.” The ancient Athenians actually invented the concept of appetizers; unfortunately for their guests, it was the only course they would serve. Other Greeks felt that this was a sign of cheapness because, as Lynceus put it, “such a layout as that may seem to offer variety, but is nothing at all to satisfy the belly.”

The ancient Romans began having true antipasto in the 3rd century B.C. and continued having this premeal course through the 4th century A.D. It included items that are still considered appetizers today, such as olives and a primitive pizza (think of the focaccia on the table at your favorite Italian restaurant).

During the Dark Ages, meals were more for sustenance than enjoyment, so antipasto had no place in it. During the Plague of the 14th century, one was lucky to get a meal at all, let alone appetizers. With the onset of the Renaissance, admiration for beauty and art was reborn and appreciation of food for its own sake reemerged. Appetizers came back in style and have remained with us to this day.

After I finish all this testing, I’m going on a diet. Maybe even a fast. Parties are fun, but parties every day become a bore (how does Paris Hilton do it, poor thing?). But I don’t want anyone to lose interest in the subject. Appetizers are creative little dishes that guests remember the next day and for days to come.

As Saki (writer H.H. Munro) wrote in “Reginald at the Carlton”:

Hors d’oeuvres…remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through considering what the next course is going to be like—and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’oeuvres.

Have a great week, everyone! And stay away from those viruses.

Actually, to make Christmas sales, it should have been out by now. My publisher, which has a very small staff, had some set-backs in their schedule and they’re struggling to catch up. And, unfortunately, that’s the way it goes in publishing sometimes. People get inundated, schedules go off-track, and unanticipated problems arise. There’s not much to be done about it except to make the best of the circumstances. Although, I’m not really sure what that means right now.

I’m determined to finish the testing of my second cookbook by the end of the year. Or, at least most of it. I’m sure I’ll have few remaining recipes after January 1, but I can deal with that. I’ve spent so many years working on this one that I’m sick of it. I want it done. I think it’s going to be a really good book, but, seriously, enough is enough!

I have a couple more book ideas on the back burner, so I’m anxious to get on those, too. I’d be happy if I could spend my life developing recipes and writing cookbooks, but I’m not Julia Child so I don’t foresee being able to pay by bills like that. So, I’m focusing this weekend on some resumes and cover letters. Doing those always depresses me because I know that each job I apply for will have hundreds of others vying for that same position. And I always end up wondering, “What the hell are they looking for? What do those other people have that I don’t?”

Resumes and cover letters are not easy. Each one has to be tailored to each specific job and it sometimes takes me a couple of hours to tweak them for a particular job. And I get the sense that I’m doing it all for nothing. I always feel that my resume will just end up on the reject pile along with the others. Over and over and over. At the end of a “resume day,” I always end up depressed and, sometimes, crying. Then, I dread doing it again. I mean, it becomes like torture to sit down and do them. So, I put it off. I’ve put it off for a while now. Mind you, there hasn’t been much available, which depresses me even more.

But a couple of job openings came up that I can handle, so I’m going to spend some time applying. I have to. Because when the question “Have you been looking?”  invariably comes up, I have to be able to honestly say “yes.” Certainly, nothing will happen if I do nothing.

On a more pleasant note, I made gluten-free chocolate-hazelnut cake and chocolate chip-hazelnut cookies, and even people who are put off by the term “gluten-free” had to admit that they were damn good. Alas, I neglected to take pictures of them.   I decorated the edge of the cake with mini nonpareils and put edible holly in the center. It was really pretty. Oh, well.

So, that’s where I am right now. I hope you all have a great weekend and coming week. See you next time.

Nonpareil photo: www.Dylanscandybar.com

On a different note, if you read my little theory on pink pastry boxes and perhaps began wondering about these mysterious boxes yourselves, you might be interested to know that one has been spotted in the wild. Yes, one of these elusive cardboard containers has been seen in real time, from a real bakery, transporting a real cake! And not in California, either!

Fellow writer, Andi Marquette, just celebrated her birthday recently and her boss treated her to a birthday cake at her place of business. Don’t you know, she called me up and said, “My cake came in a pink pastry box!” My reaction: “Shut up.” She took a picture of it and sent it to me (it’s collapsed).

It was kind of like spotting Sasquatch. You’ve heard of it, seen “pictures” of it, but have never actually seen it yourself or known anyone who has seen it with their own eyes. Well, folks. There ya go. Pink pastry boxes do exist. In my mind, that just raised the level of possibility for Sasquatch.

Fall is in the air (I had to throw a comforter on my bed last night) and that means great autumn food. One of my favorites is pumpkin. I love making fresh pumpkin pie, fritters, and soup, and incorporating it into things that don’t traditionally call for pumpkin, like chili. YUM! For Italians, the best thing about pumpkins and other squashes is their flowers. These are edible flowers that are used in a variety of ways. They are considered a delicacy. One of the most common ways of using them is in a Squash Blossom Frittata. Try my recipe HERE and let me know what you think.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who entered the drawing. This was so much fun for me, that I think I’ll do it again. Hmmm. Check in with me again.