Our Daily Bread, our family cookbook

Quote du Jour
     Pay it to the grocer, or pay it to the doctor. ~ my Grandma, Gerarda von Stietz

Challenge: Take a lifetime of recipes and...
When I fully understood that eating certain ingredients repeatedly - dairy and meat - contributes to chronic health conditions, I took 15 months to collect 40+ years of recipes, and found ways to convert most of them to using only plant-based ingredients.

1)  eliminate all animal-based ingredients...
Using many recipes that have been served at our family table for generations, I came up with cooking techniques, tools and strategies to incorporate delicious daily whole food plant-based home cooking into our busy American lifestyle. (Much as I enjoy cooking, I don't want to spend all my time preparing meals).

2)  keep the recipes delicious...
When my children started asking for the revised recipes, I realized that my perspective as a home cook, who managed to change the tastes and cooking habits of a lifetime, could help others change what is served daily in their homes. With a title inspired by a 60th wedding anniversary letter my dad wrote to our extended family, I had me a cookbook!

3)  then compile all the recipes together for family and friends.
I wanted the final look of the cookbook to be something I would be proud of, so I took a class to learn the Adobe Creative Suite of software, including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

SURPRISE - It's a diet for a healthy planet, too, WOW!
Here's the cover...the photo of earth (from the NASA website, www.nasa.gov) taken during Hurricane Katrina. I like the symbolism of this photo, because switching to a plant-based diet reduced our garbage to nearly zero. Imagine - here we have a diet that is healthier for us and for our world! This is the most important change we have made to reduce our carbon footprint, and it came as a surprise! Slowly, we realized that the garbage can we put out weekly is always nearly empty.

We self-published 75 copies of the 240 page book for family and friends in February 2013 (Big Hat Press, Lafayette, California, www.BigHatPress.com), and all the books have been distributed. Would it be worthwhile to have a 2nd printing? Well, I'm thinking about it...hence this blog.

And finally, for fun, I embellished the book with inspirational quotes collected over a lifetime - including today's Quote du Jour from my grandmother - and then turned my 3 children into...the Three Little Pigs!