By far the most frequentquestion I get about my job as arecipe developer and cookbookauthor is “Where do you get your ideas from?”It’s a great question, and the short answeris... everywhere!
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y far the most frequent question I get about my job as a recipe developer and cookbook author is “Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s a great question, and the short answer is… everywhere! But to really understand the question, I need to explain a bit about the cookbook writing process. I’ve said this in the past, but I’ll say it again: you wouldn’t believe how much thought and planning goes into a well-rounded cookbook. Because when it comes to recipe inspiration, there are two kinds.
Some recipes happen unintentionally, from any number of sources. Sometimes it’s a dish I eat at a restaurant, sometimes it’s an almost empty fridge on a night when I’m too tired to grocery shop. Sometimes a fully formed idea just pops into my head, and sometimes a dish is inspired by a completely different dish that I see or taste. Occasionally, a recipe comes about because I’m curious what would happen if I combined two things, and believe it or not, sometimes a recipe happens because an ingredient is on sale and I bought a ton of it. a Once, I even dreamed about a cake recipe! I woke up and made the first version of what would become the Butterscotch Swirl Bundt Cake in this book. The other kind of recipe inspiration is the intentional sort. Often these recipes are both more challenging and more satisfying to create than the first kind.
Because a cookbook needs to have a great assortment of dishes, I’ll find myself, for example, looking at the outline and thinking, I need another good pareve salad that doesn’t require any major prep work so people can throw it together quickly. That’s how I created the Sweet and Spicy Citrus Salad, which I’ve been making ever since. In other cases, my followers will request a recipe for a specific occasion or ingredient, and I’ll say to myself, Oh yeah, I should create one! Another source of “intentional” recipe inspiration is a specific cooking challenge.
It’s important to me that all my guests have plenty of food that fits their diet plan, so, for example, the Roasted Mushroom Minute Steak recipe in the book was created for a family member who can’t have wine, sugar, or any form of sweetener. I always take the “real life” part of my cookbook title very seriously, so when I was brainstorming ideas for my bread section, I immediately thought about what kind of bread I buy most frequently. And that’s how my recipe for Quick and Easy Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread came into existence. As a non-fish eater, I’ve always struggled during the Nine Days (why does pasta have to be so fattening?!), so some recipes in my book, like my Vegetarian Chili, were born simply out of hunger during that time.
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