July 19, 2008Despite the Fact That My Tattoo Will Be Super Lame ThereI've already made the announcement to all interested parties, so I guess that it's time for me to formally announce this here: In October, my family will be leaving Portland (temporarily!) to live in Texas for six months. We'll be living in the apartment on my parents' property so that Milo can spend time with and get to know them better, and so that we can start saving money to make a down payment on a house before we're in our 40s. Of course I'm very excited about being close to family and friends again, but I'm also looking forward to how this will affect the next cookbook! Living in the vegan paradise that is Portland, OR has spoiled me, no question. When hard-to-get, online-only specialty items like Soy Curls and Teese sneak into my recipes, I know it's time to get back to basics, and living in a small town in central Texas where I have to convince a grocery store manager to carry my brand of soymilk will be good for me and good for my creative process.
posted by joanna @ 7:23 PM
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July 13, 2008Plus: She's AdorableEvery time someone talks to me about my cookbook, they mention the illustrations. Every single time! The illustrations were done by my wonderful friend, Amanda Chronister. She is so talented and her work sets the pace and the feel for the entire cookbook. I get super annoyed when I open a cookbook and there are dozens of vanity shots of the author. You know: there's the newly-ubiquitous one of them shopping at the farmers' market. Or the one that really gets my eyes rolling: doing yoga. DOING YOGA! I'm rolling my eyes right now just thinking about it. I'm of the opinion that a cookbook should have more pictures of the food than of the author. Shocking, I know. But I wanted to infuse a little of my personality at the same time, and having the illustrations accomplished that beautifully. Hire Amanda now now now!
posted by joanna @ 7:31 AM
3 Comments
July 10, 2008SeitanI have been working on nothing but seitan for the last few weeks, and I think I've finally got a no-fail, seitan-for-dummies recipe and method which produces excellent and delicious results every time. It only took about three dozen variations to get it right. Luckily, seitan is something that gets used up very quickly at my house since I'm trying not to eat much soy, so I hardly ever have tofu or tempeh around. I'm going to make it one more time and then I'll post the recipe. Then you all have to promise to print it out and replace the seitan recipe in my book with this one!
posted by joanna @ 12:59 PM
6 Comments
July 09, 2008And Now a Few Words About the Next BookI meant to address this yesterday but was pulled away by a sleepy baby! I've been working on the second Yellow Rose Recipes, which had tentatively been titled Yellow Rose Family. However, I decided a few months ago that the book will not be targeted at families; there are already several excellent books that fill this niche. (The Vegan Family Cookbook and Vegan Family Favorites, just to name a couple.) Right now, I'm still thinking of the book as "Yellow Rose Recipes II," but finding the right title isn't my chief concern. It's finding the right audience. For the first book, I knew exactly who my audience was: me. I have dozens of wonderful vegan and vegetarian cookbooks on my shelf, but most of them consist of recipes that are either: so time-consuming that I would need to spend over an hour on prep work, which is impossible on a weeknight since I have a full time job; full of costly ingredients that make it actually more expensive for me to cook at home than it would be for us to eat out; or containing so much calories and fat that if I ate like that on a daily basis, I would steadily gain weight. I still love these cookbooks, but they are special occasion recipes, perfect for weekends, for dinner parties and birthdays. I wanted a cookbook for me: someone who cooks a healthy dinner for her family almost every night, hates repeating the same recipe twice in six months, has to shop frugally, and doesn't have a whole lot of time in which to do it all. So I wrote that cookbook! However, I still have so many more recipes to share, and I'm creating more every day. But I've lost sight of my target audience. I've put the cookbook testing on hold temporarily while I do a lot of testing, recipe creation, and refocusing. (A wonderful bonus of having a friend as a publisher: I emailed Josh asking for six more months, and he said: "No problem! Take your time!") Please do me a favor and leave a comment and tell me about yourself and what you want out of a vegan cookbook. Unless what you want is vegan meringue. You need to take your ass over to Julie Hasson or Hannah Kaminsky for that.
posted by joanna @ 11:25 AM
27 Comments
July 08, 2008Filling a VoidI was talking to Isa the other day about why she wrote Vegan with a Vengeance and she was talking about filling a void in the vegan cookbook community, which she absolutely accomplished: Vegan with a Vengeance was the first vegan cookbook that I owned that was all about making delicious, healthy, serve-to-your-parents vegan food from ingredients that you find in any grocery store. Oddly enough, I wrote my book to fill a void, too. In the fall of 2006, I was following the Weight Watchers Core Plan and had lost twelve pounds, when I read this entry on Wendy McClure's website, where she describes the Core plan as the "Weight Watchers short bus" and says that the "recipes were pretty awful." (I assume she meant the Core-friendly recipes on the Weight Watchers website and, I have to say, I completely agree with her.) But at the time of reading that, I was eating really delicious food as a vegan on the Core plan, and I took offense at being thrown on the short bus, and my first thought was: "Well that is totally ridiculous. She should eat some of my recipes." So I started compiling my Core-friendly recipes and sharing them with some of my friends who were also on Weight Watchers, and asking them if they thought I should try to throw a zine together for other vegans on the Core plan. They were supportive, and it grew from there. I've never made a big deal out of it, but over 80% of the recipes in Yellow Rose Recipes are low fat and are compatible not only for the Core Plan, but for Eat to Live. Not only did I lose quite a bit of weight eating that way, but it was the beginning of a process that ended up changing the way that I ate permanently. (Of course, I got pregnant a few months later and immediately gained the weight back, so here I am a year and a half later, just now back down to where I was that fall when I started compiling the recipes.) Maybe I should send Wendy a copy of my book.
posted by joanna @ 9:59 PM
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