The little cookbook, "Grandma's Home Bakery" is done!

It is out there seeking its audience.  You can following this link to find it.  I would appreciate your comments!

www.grandmashomebakery.com

New Developments!

Since my last post I have been wandering back and forth from the children's book project to some version of the cookbook project and not making much progress on either until the last month.  I suddenly realized that the cookbook project was too large and all encompassing.  It would never be completed in that format, at least not by me.  I began to think more clearly in terms of the audience for this book as I described in earlier posts and pages.  I really want to create a volume that teaches young people to bake as my grandmother taught me in my early childhood.  She was an excellent teacher in the kitchen and much of what I have done since as a professional chef has been based on her early teaching and ability to create interest and confidence.  Passing on her method, her ability to teach, along with her recipes - some 200+ years old is the best way for me to honor her memory and her gift to me.  I have been working away on the project, a slim volume entitled "Grandma's Home Bakery" for the last 3-4 weeks.  I have tested the recipes for the umpteenth time, photographed the method and finished product, and offered my modern updates and adaptations.  It has become a very personal project and one that will actually be completed!  I expect to self publish the book through blurb.com in early June.  When it is available I will post a link to the preview page.  You might even wish to purchase a copy.  Who knows?  It certainly feels good to have a worthy project so near completion.  I am convinced that the writing becomes easy once a clear goal is discovered.  Thank you for your patience.  As always, your comments are most welcome.

Finally writing!

I have been blocked for so long with the cookbook project.  I have been stuck at square one because I want so much to make this perfect and I know that it can never be.  So hard to get past this.

I have been reading again the childhood favorites that made me love reading from an early age.  As I have reread these classics I have been dreaming about my father's much loved cat, George.  So many stories exist within the family about George's adventures that a book about them would be easy to write.

I have begun to write his memoires with the young cat lover as the intended audience.  It is such a pleasure to write his story that I have even begun to use the Writer's Blocks software and find it so helpful.  I am hoping that by writing George's story I can unblock the cookbook project and complete both.

Bread Chapter

When I was a young cook, learning to bake from my Grandmother, I was very careful to follow her recipes and technique.  I was confident that the recipe would never let me down if I followed it exactly.  Now that I am less fearful of failure and with the benefit of my chef training a the New England Culinary Institute behind me, I can approach the recipes differently.  I find that the heart of her recipes is the technique and there can be freedom in the selection of ingredients.  The Bread Chapter will start with her tried and true recipe for White Bread handed down through generations of her family.  Once that list of ingredients and the techique have been mastered to produce the perfect loaf, we can be adventurous in the manipulation of ingredients to create a wide variety of yeast-based bread products.  The first example is the photo posted below of the Cinnamon Sticky Rolls.  I will post more photos as I work through all the manipulations of this classic bread recipe.

Evidence of Baking

 

Cinnamon Rolls:  Beautiful and Delicious!

Recipe Testing

Writing is hard work, this is fun!  I have started revisiting my Grandmother's recipes starting with the bread, which is where we began so many years ago.  This time I am approaching it with an eye to adapt the recipes to my uses and see additional uses.  This afternoon I made a two loaf batch of her white bread.  If I was being faithful to the recipe I would have used all bread flour and added a few tablespoons of yellow corn meal and shaped two loaves.  This time I used half bread and half AP flour and skipped the corn meal.  The softer dough made one gorgeous loaf and 9 cinnamon sticky buns!  Yum.  The original recipe and the adaptations will all be in the book.

Return to writing

Thank you for your patience!  It has taken quite some time for me to return to the discipline of writing.  The new page entitled "Family" is my latest effort to define the project and why I must pursue it.  I am deeply grateful to all those who have expressed their interest and support for this project and I hope to reward us all with more rapid progress.  Strangely enough, I find the process of transcribing and refining the recipes that I hope to include the most difficult part of the project.  I would have thought that would be easy!  But it demands my full attention on a regular basis to plow through it.  Not something that comes naturally.  I will persist.