Picture Yourself Cooking With Your Kids

Table of Contents ~ Picture Yourself Cooking With Your Kids

Shopping online is a wonderful thing. I know I can while away hours of a rainy afternoon curled up with a steaming mug of tea, the web, and a PayPal account. Bookstores are particularly well-suited to online purchasing; no brick and mortar store can hold what a virtual storefront can - something that is true for both small bookstore and behemoth alike.

One of the things I really miss, though, is the ability to slip cool pages between my fingers, getting the feel of a book. Indexes draw me first - how weird is that? - I look up a few key things that give me an idea of the tone and intended audience of a book. If it is a kid's cookbook, I look for pizza: Is there a crust recipe or simply an instruction to split an English muffin? (Don't get me wrong, I love English muffins. Yet the resemblance between them and pizza crust is nominal, at least it should be.) Another key point is the ratio of sweet to savory. Books dedicated to sweet treats are great, but if a general cookbook is half sugar-laden concoctions, it gives me pause.

From there, I move on to the Table of Contents to see how the author organized the book. How many pages are devoted to a given topic? What are the key points being covered? (I never gave the TOC of a book much thought beyond the obvious until we wrote the first edition of Understanding Directory Services (2nd Edition) Every person who read the proposal praised the 'parallelism' of the TOC. After a half dozen people did so, I started reading TOCs. At least I know who to blame for this particular obsession.)

Photographs matter in cookbooks, too. I really like books that have photos of most, or all, recipes. When I was contemplating writing a cookbook, this issue loomed large. Photographs are expensive to print and publishers are loathe to do a book full of them. Fortunately for me, I snagged a spot in a photo-heavy series, allowing me to do step-by-step photos of each recipe. (Sort of like Pioneer Woman, but with only a handful of photos per recipe...less butter...nutritional information for each recipe. No cows. Definitely no cows. There are cute punks, though. Lots of them.)

I must confess, I also read Acknowledgments. Sometimes I read them first. This one is simple: having written a number of books, I realize that any book is teamwork; I like to see the team get its props. Agents, editors, production teams, graphic artists, and that all important indexer are a good start, but how about the people who kept them fed and in clean clothes while the book absorbed their life? If the book is by a  blogger, did they acknowledge their peers and fans? (No person is an island seems more true for bloggers than many folks. If your book bears your blog's name, you had a lot of people who helped you make the deal; they are called readers. Tell them thanks.) Peter Reinhart is really good at this as I discovered one day when I searched for my name at Amazon and discovered it in two of his books. I was a recipe tester, but figured I was one of a couple hundred, far too many to list.

This is all a long way of saying that, while I can't slide a book through the tubes of the Internet to let you turn the pages for yourself, I can give you a peek at my Table of Contents. I hope it gives you a bit of a clue about what I was going after with the book. More importantly, it has the complete list of recipes. (I also put links to a few reviews after the TOC, just in case it piques your interest.)

Wordless Wednesday: Apple Puffcake

recipe here

Personal Pavlova Recipe

The Pavlova is one of those bits of food magic that everyone should make once. While it may look intimidating, at its heart it is as simple as strawberry shortcake. You're not afraid to make strawberry shortcake, are you? I didn't think so.

This combination of meringue, whipped cream and fruit is a classic dessert in Australia and New Zealand where it was created as a tribute to the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. (Imagine a ballerina in a white tutu floating across the stage.) There is a bit of a kerfluffle brewing at the moment over whether bragging rights for the pavlova belong to Australia or New Zealand, but truth be told, I don't care a bit. 

Pavlovas combine some of my favorite things: the lightly crunchy exterior of the meringue that gives way to an almost marshmallow center, barely-sweetened whipped cream, and fresh berries. Sweet. Simple. Perfect.

And easier to make than you may think.

Eat Pie Cookies! (with recipe)

Contrary to what the corporate media would have you think, not all kids grow up without a clue about cooking, some even get lots of hands-on time early on. I was one of those lucky ones, as is the monstrrr in these pictures. Let's call her awesomeGrrl, because she is awesome (the kid speaks three languages already...oh, and American Sign Language...geez!) and she's learning all about being an awesome cook and baker from a very young age.

awesomeGrrl is also the star of the book's video, which you can see at the Amazon page:

Picture Yourself Cooking With Your Kids

awesomeGrrl's Aunt Marcella came to visit recently and they baked Marcella's Pie Cookies. These cookies are the cupcake of pies: tender sour cream pastry and a rich date filling shaped into tiny little puffed flowers. In the family since the turn of the last century, the recipe for these cookies was passed to Marcella when she was about nine years old, which would have been quite a few years ago, since Marcella celebrated her 80th birthday a while back by throwing herself out of a perfectly good airplane, but that's another story. As you might guess, Marcella is a bit of an awesomeGrrl herself; more than a few of women in the family point to her as who they want to be like when they are 80.