I’m always fascinated by fancy gourmet chocolate shows.

The creativity is cutting edge. And it’s so much fun to speak with the proprietors who striving to please the public with their signature chocolate creations.

Best of all, at these chocolate shows, I have the luxury of taste-testing some very expensive chocolates that I’d never get to try otherwise.

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Perhaps you are the family member other family members contact when they have a question about Aunt Betty’s apple crisp or Uncle Johnny’s barbecue sauce.  You are the one with custom recipe cards and have vowed to make your own family cookbook with the beloved family recipes.

Does that make you the family food historian? Well, perhaps.

Review our 10 point family food historian character profile and see if you fall into the family food historian category:

Family Food Historian Character Profile

1. Wants to know who in the family made a family recipe first.

2. Documents family recipes like the precious heritage they are.

3. Considers an old family recipe found in a dusty family bookshelf a treasure.

4. Has too many cookbooks and family recipes, but continues to collect them anyway.

5. Has created several family cookbooks with Matilda’s Fantastic Cookbook Software.

6. Likes to share family cooking knowledge and kitchen techniques with others.

7. Cherishes the family recipes written in a family member’s own handwriting.

8. Enjoys making and eating old family recipes, and trying new ones.

9. Loves to entertain friends with tales (and samples) of family cooking exploits.

10. Knows that a family recipe — along with many beloved memories — will endure as long as it is properly appreciated and preserved.

If you recognize yourself in five or more of these 10 characteristics:  Congratulations, you are definitely the family food historian.  It is an important role; a job you do selflessly for the family out of love (and a bit of fame among the motley family group who cannot boil water).

Yes, being the authority on family recipes, family cookbooks, family cooking history, et al, certainly is a big job. Somebody’s gotta do it. Might as well be you¦the one who cares. We at The Cookbook People are glad to help.

Happy family cookbook making!

Erin

On a crisp autumn day there’s nothing more warming and comforting than a fragrant hot beverage. One of my favorite indulgences is my instant Chai tea mix.

The delightful aroma and the warm, soothing effect of the spices is a wonderful way to end a long cold day. I especially enjoy a cup of instant Chai tea while curled up with a blanket in front of the fire.

You can easily make it up in big batches and use it throughout the cold autumn and winter months.

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Is there a section in your family cookbook devoted to the age-old fundraiser known as a bake sale? If not, you might want to add these 5 tips for bake sale success into a new section devoted to such events, along with recipes for your favorite easy-to-make bake sale goodies.

With schools and churches having bake sales for fundraising, now is also a good time to review what makes a successful bake sale. Following are my 5 tips for bake sale success:

TIP 1. LOCATION & SET UP
Just as in the real estate world, bake sale success is all about location, location, location. There is no substitute for a highly visible location for your bake sale table. Being seen is the one major secret to bake sale success.  A busy pharmacy next to a supermarket may be a great place because you won’t compete with the store’s bakery.  Use tables to display the baked goods attractively (with a festive tablecover), and have chairs for helpers to sit down. Be sure to arrive early on the day of your bake sale to set up and get organized.

TIP 2. SIGNAGE & PROMOTION
Promote your bake sale in advance by putting up flyers around your community and in local businesses that agree to help your promotion. Make signs of yellow or white poster board. Print large letters on your computer or use a fat black marker to write BAKE SALE in big capital letters. Hang signs on three sides of the table. If allowed, attach some balloons. Also make your sales sail by using festive paper, ribbons, or stickers to add some creative packaging and pizzazz. Bake sale success is as much about marketing as great baked goods!

TIP 3. PRODUCT VARIETY
Ensure bake sale success by asking friends, family, and neighbors to contribute freshly baked items. Also ask for donations of bakery goods from the local supermarket to fill in the gaps not covered by the homemade goodies. A good product mix is to have brownies, small cakes, cupcakes, cookies, sweet and savory bread loaves, and whole cakes. You can sell some easy-to-eat individual items at premium prices, or pre-package baked items into an economical dozen assortment. Be careful about selling baked goods that will run up expenses. For example, a slice of pie requires a plate, napkin and fork. A whole pie requires nothing more than the plastic wrap over the top. Another good product option is to have sugarless, low-fat, or organic baked items for the more health conscious.

TIP 4. PRICING
Pricing items effectively is the other major secret to bake sale success.  Some people like to make price tags for each item.  Personally, it is much less work to group baked items for sale on the table according to a set price, and tape just one small sign on the tablecover, such as ”Whole Cakes $4.95.”  (Smart bake sale sellers won”t have that nickel change available to encourage folks to donate the extra nickel. This technique works great at yard sales, too.)

TIP 5. TIME MANAGEMENT
Ask members of your group to sign up for 2 hour shifts. Most everyone can spare 2 hours, even during a busy weekend. I”ve found that those who do come have such a good time chatting with customers that they often stay longer.  Make sure volunteers have water to drink, paper towels, and moist wipes or hand sanitizer.  Also be sure to have such supplies as Saran Wrap, plastic bags, and paper bags. And, always after the limelight of your bake sale success, be sure to send thank you letters to everyone who helped, from store manager right on down to the kid in the stroller who bobbed the balloon to get attention!

Weve had many bake sale fundraising triumphs in our town using these 5 tips for bake sale success.  Feel free adapt them to your next bake sale.

Good cookbooking,

Erin

Do you love researching your family genealogy?

You’ll be delighted to know that some states have designated October as “Family History Month.”

The month-long observance brings families together to remember loved ones, tell their stories, and celebrate family traditions.Continue reading→

A loud pounding sound radiating from the kitchen captured my attention and curiosity. Upon arrival, I caught my husband using my best French chef’s knife to jab frozen mango Tang out of my favorite clear plastic Kool Aid-style pitcher. I wasn’t too happy about the potentials of his act: breaking the knife; breaking the pitcher, cutting himself.

My husband is known for using kitchen objects to do the jobs of other tools. I’ve found steel whisks coated with cement, boning knives used as letter openers, egg turners as wallpaper scrapers, and butter knives bent from their stint as screwdrivers. (I try to credit these transgressions to his inventive, creative mind rather than his laziness to go to his workbench.)

My chef’s knife was fine, much to the credit of the manufacturer. I attribute its survival to the fact that it was made of high carbon stainless steel, the tang (blade steel) ran all the way through the whole handle, and it was the best chef’s knife I could afford (the three basic rules of buying kitchen knives).

My thoughts turned toward ways to protect my knives from future misuse. I could always downsize. I read somewhere that a cook really only needs to buy three kitchen knives:

Paring Knife
Blade between 2”-4” long.  Used for cutting fruits or vegetables and for making small or decorative cuts.

Serrated Utility Knife
Blade between 6”- 9” long.  Used for cutting larger vegetables, slicing larger foods, trimming/cutting meat. Note: A longer 9”-12” serrated blade bread knife will easily cut a crusty baguette or tomatoes.

Chef’s Knife
Blade between 6”-12” long that curves to a pointed tip. Used for chopping, dicing and mincing meat, vegetables, and anything else.

Of course, buying kitchen knives is okay for specialty purposes, too, such as boning, filleting, and carving. And then there is the meat cleaver.  I can’t imagine needing a meat cleaver any more, though, since butchers do the work for us quite nicely. Meat cleavers can be heavy and quite awkward. (The most important rule of thumb for buying kitchen knives is to buy what is comfortable in your hand.)

Maybe I should put my knives out of my husband’s sight!  I currently keep my knives on a wall-mounted magnetic strip. They don’t get banged around (unless you-know-who is looking for another tool), and I don’t waste valuable counter space using an ugly wooden knife block.

So that’s my new plan. Instead of buying kitchen knives to replace the broken ones, I will downsize my collection of kitchen knives to the three basics and hide them away. (Out of sight, out of mind, they say.)  But first I have to go to my husband’s workbench and take inventory of what kitchen knives I don’t need or use any more.

By the way, in the process of cracking up the frozen mango Tang, my husband broke the pitcher’s handle completely off and poked a hole in the bottom of the pitcher.  He repaired both with some miraculous glue stuff, and (you guessed it) a paring knife!

Happy cookbooking,

Erin

I remember the time President George Bush the Elder made a snide comment about a certain green vegetable that he did not — would not — eat. The resulting fluff in the media was nothing short of a scandal as I recall. The broccoli lobby and every broccoli farmer in America claimed insult.

Funny, why George didn’t like broccoli? It has quite a nice earthy green flavor, and my favorite use is steamed with salt and drizzled with melted butter (sorry, I haven’t quite got the hang of drizzling olive oil on everything).  Broccoli, along with its cousins cauliflower and brussels sprouts, are all DNA derivatives of cabbage, I’m told, so it stands to reason if you like one of these vegetables, you might like them all.  Not sure what George’s stance was on the cousins to broccoli, but we defended his right to dislike it.

During the coming fall season, a lovely way to use fresh (or even leftover broccoli) is in Cream of Broccoli Soup. I use the whole stem and florets of the broccoli rather than trimming it down to just the broccoli crowns.

Cream of Broccoli Soup

1-1/2 pounds of broccoli
1 cup minced onion
1/2 cup grated carrot
1/2 cup minced celery
2 teaspoons stick butter or margarine
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups water
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup evaporated milk
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper

To make Cream of Broccoli Soup, cook washed broccoli in salted water until a fork easily pierces the stem. Drain and cool. While broccoli cools, sauté the onion, carrot and celery in butter until onion is translucent. Add the flour to the vegetables and stir to make a roux.  Set aside.  Puree the cooked broccoli with a little water in a food processer until smooth.

Heat broth, the rest of the water, and evaporated milk until warm.  Stir broccoli, onion, carrot and celery mixture into the heated broth.  Add salt and pepper seasonings to taste, and cook until flour roux begins to thicken the soup (add a bit more flour if necessary). Heat Cream of Broccoli Soup again if necessary and serve with toasted cheese or ham sandwiches.

Believe it or not, I found this recipe for Cream of Broccoli Soup in one my grandmother’s old recipe card boxes. It was hand-printed on a well-worn recipe card. She used to make this soup during the first days of fall. The Cream of Broccoli Soup carries through well during winter, and even if you use frozen broccoli instead of fresh (or leftovers) it is a good result.

Happy Cookbooking,

Erin

Sometimes I scare myself. Does that ever happen to you?

Sometimes I will come up with an idea that I think is absolutely brilliant.

Like my little brilliant thought for today.  I was preparing a nice Chef’s Salad for lunch, expecting Ruth to drop by a touch early as she usually does.  I had boiled and peeled my eggs, and was just about to slice them with a small knife when I remembered an old kitchen gadget I acquired years ago.  It was an egg slicer, which cuts thin, even slices of egg using taut wires that easily slide through the cooked egg without making a mess or squishing the yolk.  It is very handy if you eat a lot of sliced boiled eggs.

Then I turned my attention to the meats and cheeses for the Chef’s Salad. I always hate to slice up the meats and cheeses. They never behave as neatly as I like, always moving around on the cutting board while I’m trying to create matchsticks (properly called julienne strips) of them.

As I was putting away the egg slicer (hand-washed and towel-dried, mind you), I spied my pizza cutter and said, “Why Not?”  So I took the pizza cutter in hand, and proceeded to slice through the meats and cheeses so effortlessly that it was astonishing.  The blade on my pizza cutter is about 3-1/2″ in diameter, so in less than 30 seconds I had enough ham, turkey, Swiss and Cheddar to generously serve us both.  Brilliant!

It scares me to think what I might have done if I had applied myself. Not that having a cookbook software company is small potatoes. It is really brilliant, too. But who knows, I may have invented some kitchen gadget that was really useful. (Maybe more useful even than my spice rack?)

Now, what did I do with that plastic radish garnisher?

When one of our sons started playing with our spice rack as a toy shelf, well, we thought maybe there’s a new market for it! So here’s the video he helped us make.

Back in the 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock had a famous dinner party for an intimate gathering of his Hollywood friends.  As an experiment (and most likely a joke), he asked his chef to prepare all blue foods: blue martinis, blue meat, blue mashed potatoes, and blue peas.

He was fascinated with human psychology, and the fact that blue is not a natural color for food. He wanted to see if blue food would turn people off.  It did. Many of his guests became a bit queasy and some couldn’t even eat, if I remember the story right.

Hitchcock loved to entertain, and guests never knew when a “blue dye” dinner party would strike his fancy.  While a blue food party may be a bit inhospitable to spring upon guests unexpectedly, if you have them involved beforehand, it can be quite a lot of fun and a clever conversation starter, too. I have a party like this once in a blue moon. I use either all white or blue themed plates, napkins and cups, and ask everyone to wear something blue.

Of course, you can do any other color theme, such as red, yellow or orange. Here are food ideas for a blue food party, purple food party or green food party to get you started:

“BLUE” THEME PARTY FOODS
Blue food coloring added to any dish (note: can be repulsive)
Blue corn chips
Blue potato chips
Boo Berries cereal
Blue crab
Bluefish pate
Bluefin tuna sushi
Blue cheese
Concord grapes
Blueberries
Blue Jell-O
Blueberry muffins
Blue food coloring frosted cupcakes
Blueberry juice
Gatorade
Jones’ Soda
Kool-Aid
Blue Hawaiian Punch
Blueberry flavored bubblegum
Charm’s Blowpops
Blue M&M’s

“PURPLE” THEME PARTY FOODS
Purple food coloring added to any dish (note: can be repulsive)
Grape juice
Kool-Aid
Blueberry juice
Grape jelly/jam and peanut butter sandwiches
Eggplant
Purple potatoes
Purple onions
Purple cabbage
Purple wax beans or peppers
Concord grapes
Blackberries
Plums
Prunes
Grape Jell-O
Blueberry-Pomegranate sherbet

“GREEN” THEME PARTY FOODS
Green food coloring added to any dish (note: can be repulsive)
Artichokes
Guacamole (with tortilla chips)
Avocado slices
Celery sticks
Lettuce
Stuffed green bell peppers
Green bean casserole
Green pasta
Asparagus
Broccoli
Brussels sprouts
Cabbage
Cucumbers
Green beans
Green peppers, other peppers,
Peas
Spinach
Zucchini
Gatorade
Limeade
Green grapes
Green apples
Pears
Kiwi
Honeydew melon
Lime Jell-O
Mint chocolate chip ice cream
Key Lime pie

Once you’ve had a color-food party like this, don’t forget to record all the fun recipes and ideas into your family cookbook using the cookbook templates in my cookbook software!

Have fun!

Erin

Without a doubt, cheese is one of my favorite foods. Not just for recipes in family cookbooks, mind you; how about just eating it straight, with maybe a little cracker or two?

Yes, I love cheese. That may not be politically correct to admit in this allegedly fat-free conscious society (where zero body fat is an absurd goal for tweens and teens alike), but I bet there are many closet cheese eaters out there looking for the perfect hit of creamy Brie, sharp cheddar, or a pungent hard white.

One of my life’s dreams has always been to have enough money to try one of every type of cheese in the world. When I was visiting the famous Harrods department store last year in London, I nearly swooned at the sight of the stunning fromagerie cheese counter in the ground level food hall. Ahem, the cheese AISLE, that is. You can try many cheese samples, or you can sit and taste a variety of cheeses, carefully measured and portioned according to whatever your pocketbook can stand. With the rate of exchange on the U.S. dollar being so cringingly unfavorable, I opted to watch other cheese lovers instead of indulging in what most certainly would have been a most expensive cheese-filled afternoon.

Back at home, however, there are marvelous wonders of the world in our own well-appointed cheese cases, according to the American Dairy Association.  Yet, I am always uncertain exactly what I am buying in terms of portion, and especially when I need a type of cheese converted for a recipe, or serving to guests.  I do know that most soft cheeses are shredded, hard cheeses are grated, and the blues and feta are crumbled, but I still don’t automatically know how much shredded cheese I will net out of a whole brick of ungrated cheese. With the help of The Recipe Writer’s Handbook, my dilemma has been resolved for most cheese types:

 ‘I LOVE CHEESE’ CHART

Source: The Recipe Writer’s Handbook, Page 235
By Barbara Gibbs Ostmann & Jane L. Baker
© 2001, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.Â

I carry this little chart with me when grocery shopping, as it helps me visualize what I am buying. I try to buy only natural cheeses, not the process cheeses (have you ever made the mistake of buying that awful shredded artificial cheese? Yuck!).

Yes, I do love cheese. Oh look, there is that blue Brie I was coveting at Harrods’¦ Whoops, what cheese?

Your cheese-loving, cookbook-making friend,

Erin

Have you had your catfish today? Apparently August is National Catfish Month. Didn’t you get the memo?

National Catfish Month seems to be the only ”national month” designation for the month of August. (There are rumors that August is National Peach Month, National Watermelon Month, and National Sandwich Month, but I couldn’t confirm them.)

Other months have several ”national” titles, such as September being designated National Mushroom Month, National Rice Month, National Biscuit Month, National Chicken Month, AND National Honey Month.

Such national observations are helpful for the particular industry they promote, and some even raise awareness.  However, a true national holiday requires an act of Congress to make it official.  So, if any of these commemorative days and months are actually government-sanctioned, the food industry must have some very busy lobbyists.

Below is a list of just-past ”national” days in August.  Most of the days seem to appeal to those with sweet tooth’s, all except the mustard celebration on August 5.  (Note to President Obama’s critics, Grey Poupon Mustard is made by Kraft Foods , so it is American!).

To be fair, here are the celebration ”days” we have already observed for the month of August:

August 1  National Raspberry Cream Pie Day
August 2  National Ice Cream Sandwich Day
August 2  National Ice Cream Soda Day
August 3  National Watermelon Day
August 4  National Chocolate Chip Day
August 5  National Mustard Day
August 6  National Root Beer Float Day
August 7  Raspberries ‘n Cream Day
August 8  National Frozen Custard Day
August 9  National Rice Pudding Day
August 10  National S’mores Day
August 11  National Raspberry Bombe Day
August 14  National Creamsicle Day
August 15  National Lemon Meringue Pie Day
August 17  National Vanilla Custard Day
August 18  National Ice Cream Pie Day
August 19  National Soft Ice Cream Day
August 20  National Chocolate Pecan Pie Day
August 21  National Spumoni Day
August 22  National Pecan Torte Day
August 23  National Spongecake Day
August 24  National Peach Pie Day
August 25  National Banana Split Day
August 26  National Cherry Popsicle Day
August 27  National Pots de Créme Day
August 28  National Cherry Turnovers Day

Just so we don’t lose out on the rest of the celebrations, here are the remaining designated “days” for the month of August:

August 29  More Herbs Less Salt Day
August 30  National Toasted Marshmallow Day
August 31  National Trail Mix Day

So looking forward to National Chocolate Milkshake Day on Saturday, September 12. My dear friend Ruth and I will make it a point to enjoy a favorite indulgence. Now if I can only remember where I put my appointment calendar to jot it down. Perhaps I tucked it in my family cookbook.

Happy cookbooking,

Erin