Seven years ago – even eight years ago, if I’m being totally accurate – in the months leading up to JR’s and my wedding, I instituted the celebration of a pre-versary. Each month leading up to our wedding (yeah, I know, I know – totally dorky, but, then, there I am. A dork.), on the 19th, we celebrated our impending nuptials with an extra-special meal in, sometimes even a night out, until the long-awaited wedding day actually arrived.
I was inclined to celebrate monthly post-versaries, but JR is far less of a geek than I, and we need a quorum of two to institute faux holidays here, so we quickly adapted to the societal norm, the lone yearly anniversary celebration.
I haven’t been as excited about anything since our wedding to warrant a pre-versary, until now. Two months from today, the Poor Girl Gourmet cookbook will be released. For those two months leading up to May 18, and for quite a few months to follow, I’ll be kicking my promotion act into high gear, but for tonight, I think we’ll celebrate in true pre-versary fashion – with a nice dinner and bottle of wine (I’m actually working, so perhaps we’ll even spring for a fancy steak), and the hope and expectation that this new adventure will be just as wonderful as our marriage has been (see? super-dork.).
If you’re looking for the book while I geek out over here, it can be found on Amazon, BN.com, Borders, ecookbooks.com, and Indiebound, all in pre-order, of course. I’ll remind you about it again on May 18th, and possibly even on the April pre-versary. Hard to say. I like these pre-versary things, after all.
i am so so so very excited for you! i can’t wait to get a copy myself!
so question:
i read somwhere that a lot of ppl collect cookbooks but when surveyed, they actually only do 1 recipe from the book and shelf it. that got me thinking if i do that and i have made a very conscious effort to refer to my cookbooks and old magazines to make it worth the $ i spent on them. do you do that too & how did you go about choosing recipes for your cookbook in the hopes of hvaing the reader refer to your cookbook often? (hopefully i phrased that question properly)
Lan, you should be an interviewer! What a great question!
I have long been guilty of hoarding cookbooks. For a while, in my mid-twenties, I belonged to a cookbook mail order club, and I ordered more books than I’ll ever hope to cook from. If only I stopped buying cookbooks at that point. But, oh, no. I did not. My dining room is overrun.
Some cookbooks that I have bought over the years, I have never cooked from, though some of those add to my life (or so I like to think!) because they have gorgeous photography, or interesting writing. So I’m as guilty as anyone of buying and shelving, and I find that I use only a few cookbooks for reference here and there.
This doesn’t stop me from having a cookbook obsession, though, and I still buy cookbooks that I don’t need – part of my OCD, I guess.
What I did when I was planning out my cookbook was in part an attempt to channel my friends and family who don’t cook as frequently as I do, and to try to anticipate hang-ups or concerns they would have. Looking at it that way caused me to explain things that might be pitfalls or perceived as pitfalls (even though they’re actually not).
I also wanted to create a flexible cookbook, so that people would know that if they didn’t want to have the orange sauce with chicken, it would work equally as well with pork. For lack of a better term, and possibly inviting a cease-and-desist order with the mere mention of the name, I likened the way I looked at many of the recipes to Garanimals – a mix and match approach, so that people wouldn’t necessarily think that there was only one way to use a particular element of a recipe.
The other thing in the book is a menu suggestion guide with ideas for complete meals from the book as well as a breakdown of costs, so that each full meal for 4 is still under $15, unless it’s from the “Splurges” chapter (because I, myself, was – um, and still am – financially embarrassed, I figured that if you’re buying the book, you likely are looking to keep costs down, too). The goal of that section is not only to create meals for less than $15, but also to help people pair main dishes with sides, so that they don’t have to fret over that.
For that approach, I owe thanks to a chef friend who teaches classes to adults. She has mentioned, on more than one occasion, that her students are usually looking for guidance as to what goes with what, so hopefully by tackling that both in the mix-and-match recommendations in the recipes themselves, as well as with the menu suggestions, people will feel they got a lot of value for their money with this cookbook.
I definitely wanted to be sure that people felt like they got tools and flexibility to be creative themselves, not just a “this is the one and only way to use this” mandate.
So now, I have a question: Can we go on book tour together? And could you ask additional, really insightful questions that are fun to answer?
Thank you!
Amy
The cover looks so appetizing, like the paint scheme at La Panera. As I was reading this my oldest boy asked me what was for dinner – so I doubt your book will sit on a shelf un-cooked from!
-Christine
Thank you, Christine! I hope that you and your family like the book!
Take care,
Amy
Congratulations! Wishing you all the best success with the book. Looks like it will be great.
My Dear Amy,
Seeing this post in my reader made my lil heart skip all over the place. I feel like I sorta tagged along during the entire process and am amazed that the launch is so near. Congrats!