One of the writing projects I assigned myself in 2014 was a cookbook. I love cookbooks and have collected them for years. The last time I counted them I had seventy-three, not including the over-stuffed binder and the pile of gourmet magazines. I’ve cooked from all of them at one time or another, and often a dish I prepare is a combination of several recipes. I have also maintained a food blog since 2009, which has been a labor of love.
The best cookbooks combine stories, whimsical or factual, with the recipes. One of my favorites, Italy — A Culinary Journey, contains many classic recipes organized by region. The photography of the food and the landscapes, cities, et cetera, is breathtaking, and the historically based stories that accompany each section are charming. I have read that cookbook countless times and dreamed of seeing the coast of Puglia where my grandparents were born.
I did not have the energy or resources to take on a project of this magnitude. I decided to do something a bit quirky — to combine my newfound affection for flash fiction with recipes I’ve prepared. Better yet, because I love bacon, I included bacon or pork in as many of the stories as I could, and attached a link at the end of the story to a yummy recipe. Sounds easy, right? Um, no. Continue reading “Bacon Aporkalypse: The Cookbook”
The answer may not be ‘never’ of course, although I’m as guilty as everyone for panicing when it’s too late. But if you have a WordPress site you may have used their handy little ‘export’ function assiduously, under the impression that your site would be instantly restorable if necessary. Unfortunately the download this creates, sitting smugly in the Cloud somewhere, will have a few details missing.
Recently Martin Crosbie wrote a post where he talked a bit