Behind the Scenes: The Colorful Family Table Cookbook
With only a week until my new cookbook, The Colorful Family Table, comes out, I thought I would give you a little glimpse inside my why for writing the book and how the whole process came together. It’s been a JOURNEY to say the least! The past four years have really been a blur of babies and books, so I’m excited to look back an appreciate all the amazing things that have happened…
The Beginning
Let’s go waaay back in time to November of 2015. I had just signed my first book deal to write The Colorful Kitchen and I was on top of the world! I loved creating recipes for my blog so much, and to have the privilege of putting my recipes, photos and writing into a real book that people could find at the bookstore? Such a dream! I spent a week organizing my recipes, planning how I was going to structure my work days, pricing ingredients…and I found out I was pregnant.
I powered through a terrible bout of morning sickness then spent the next seven months making recipes day in and day out so I could get ahead of schedule before the Baby came in August. Aside from the morning sickness, I had an amazing pregnancy and felt great from months 4-9. I enjoyed every second of the recipe testing process and loved honing my photography and writing skills. I turned my manuscript in feeling great, and immediately started dreaming of what book #2 would be about.
Flash forward another year (the editing, design and printing process takes a whole year!) and The Colorful Kitchen hits the bookstore shelves! Seeing the recipes come to life in other folk’s kitchen was gratifying beyond anything I could have imagined, and hearing from readers that my recipes helped them eat more colorful plants and less junk was truly a dream come true.
The Reviews Came in…
I started to notice that a really big chunk of the reviews, messages and emails that I received about the book were from parents who made the recipes for their whole family. So many lovely mamas shared photos on instagram of their little ones helping them cook from the book or trying a new vegetable for the first time, and I started to think that since my recipes are already simple and nutritious, they’re naturally geared towards families, so maybe that’s what book #2 should be about...
Plus- hello!- I was now the mama of an 18-month-old and was learning the ins and outs of cooking for a plant-based little one. I was becoming more and more passionate helping new generations become healthier, and I knew that many of my readers were entering the same stage of life that I was now in.
Just as I was starting to put this idea together in my mind, I received an email from my literary agent, Christina, with the subject line “The Colorful Kitchen for Kids?” She basically pitched me on the exact idea I had been dreaming up in my head! It was clearly perfectly aligned, so just 2 months after my first book was released, I started to get to work on a proposal for my second book.
I Didn’t Want to Write a “Kids” Book
Now, I didn’t want to write a book of recipes “for kids.” I do NOT believe in making multiple dishes for each meal to satisfy each person in the family, and I DO believe it’s possible to make delicious, wholesome recipes that everyone in the family will love. Recipes that I consider to be “family friendly” are easy to make (busy parents don’t have time to follow complicated directions!), full of tons of color (colors = nutrients) and are filling and hearty (no wimpy salads).
I started to think about other ways that the book could help families become healthier. In my own life, I’ve found that eating with the seasons has helped me feel my best, both physically and mentally. On a larger scale, eating less meat and dairy is better for the earth, but the way our produce is grown is also essential. When we eat with the seasons, we’re more likely to shop locally and organic, and basically it’s a huge win-win for the earth and all of it’s inhabitants when we tune into the seasons.
I thought back to my own childhood and how out-of-touch my family had been with where our food comes from, how it’s grown and even what’s in it. There’s just so much about food and health that I didn’t learn until I was in my 20’s, and I knew I wanted my children to grow up being more empowered around their food choices (so much more about this in the introduction of the book!). Suddenly the vision for The Colorful Family Table was crystal clear!
It took about 2 months for me to write the proposal for the new book, then there were a few rounds of editing with Christina before she sent it off to my publisher. By April I signed the deal to write my second cookbook…and then I found out I was pregnant (seriously!!).
Pregnant…Again!
My publisher originally had a spring 2020 release date in mind (that would give me 10 months to write the book), but given the seasonal organization and my penchant for all things warm and cozy, I really wanted the book to come out in fall 2019. They gave me the green light, as long as I could write it in 7 months, with a December deadline that was exactly one week after my Baby’s due date. Even though that is such a short amount of time to write an entire book and photograph 100 recipes (most cookbook authors hire a separate photographer to do the photos, but this is my absolute favorite part so I wasn’t going to let anyone else do it!), I wanted to be able to take a real maternity break after the baby was born anyways, so it made sense to me to power through for the earlier deadline.
This pregnancy was different than my first. The first three months I had (all day) morning sickness that was so bad, I could hardly get off the couch most days. I fell asleep every night by 8pm and had absolutely no energy for Baby V. I was supposed to be working on the book three days a week when Baby V was with our nanny, but I was so nauseas that the thought of eating most foods, let alone cooking them and making them look presentable for photos, was absolutely terrible and I mostly spent that precious (read: expensive) time napping and googling morning sickness remedies (spoiler: nothing worked).
Also, we realized very quickly that we didn’t want to be a family of four crammed into our tiny Brooklyn apartment, so we started looking at houses in the suburbs.
Life was absolutely crazy for a few months, but things started looking up in June. We found the perfect house in a small New Jersey town right outside of NYC, my morning sickness was starting to subside, and I was able to really dive into work on the book. We got settled into the house and I hit the ground running on the book. I caught up on the spring chapter and quickly worked my way through the summer chapter.
I rounded up an incredible group of recipe testers (hey team!) and each week I would send them recipes that they would make, then fill out a little survey about how clear the directions were, any questions that came up, how they liked the final result, etc. I felt so lucky to have such a dedicated team because the feedback that I received really helped me to fine tune the recipes.
Many of the recipes were dishes that I had already been making for my family for ages. Some were inspired by seasonal finds at the farmers market. Others may or may not have been born out of pregnancy cravings…
Fall rolled around and my belly was getting bigger and bigger. I started to become very aware of how close my manuscript deadline and the Baby’s due date were, and I kept hoping that the Baby wouldn’t come early. Physically, I never really felt great during my this pregnancy, and it was becoming harder and harder for me to spend hours on my feet in the kitchen and on top of a step stool in my photo studio. By the time I started working on the winter chapter, I was only able to make 1-2 recipes a day (compared to 4-5 per day when I worked only my first book).
I Really Can’t (and don’t!) Do it All
One thing that other parents (usually mamas) always ask me is how I “do it all.” How did I write two cookbooks with pregnancies and babies and toddlers in the house? This question always makes me laugh because I don’t do any work while the girls are home!
There is so much pressure in our society for moms to “do it all”- have a career, make the lunches, pick the kids up from school, keep their house clean and look cute in Instagram photos. I want to be very clear that I don’t do it all, because I simply can’t! And I don’t believe it’s my responsibility to do all of these things (even though the patriarchy would have us think otherwise).
Mamas often ask me how I’ve written two books full of recipes while they struggle to make dinner with their kids home. I want to be very clear that I don’t do any of my work cooking, photography or writing with the girls around! That would simply be impossible. Over the past three years we’ve paid an insane amount of money in nannies, babysitters, daycare and preschool so that Ross and I can work.
Currently, Baby V is in full-time preschool and Baby L is in daycare three days a week. Sometimes I’ll have a sitter come on the days she’s home if I have a meeting or extra work that week, but I really wanted her to have quality alone time with me, just like Baby V did at that age. During the two days that Baby L is home, I’ll take her grocery shopping with me to prepare for recipe testing and respond to emails while she’s napping, but I really can’t (and don’t want to) do any work while we’re home together.
I will say that I do enjoy cooking with the girls and think it’s an important piece of helping them develop a healthy relationship with food, but any cooking I do with them is just for us to eat/for fun and never recipes that I’m testing or photographing.
The Stars Aligned
Ok, back to working on the cookbook. Somehow the timing just worked itself out! I turned everything in on time, except for the lifestyle photos and a handful of recipe images, but luckily editor generously let me send those in after my maternity leave was up. Baby L was born one day past her due date and was able to take 2 months completely off of work, which was absolutely amazing and I feel so lucky to have had that time with my family.
Since the book is all about families eating and cooking together, I wanted there to be candid, real life photos of my family in the book. I found an amazing local photographer, Desirea Corbett, and was just completely blown away by her ability to capture candid family moments. I’ll be honest, I was very nervous about this photoshoot because I was only 2 months postpartum and was not feeling like my most photogenic self. My skin was less-than-glowing from barely getting a few hours of sleep each night and none of my pre-pregnancy clothes fit yet…but this book is about real life recipes and well, this is my real life!
In the end, I was so thrilled with how the photos turned out. She captured our family and the pretty light in our little kitchen so perfectly. I actually kind of love looking back and seeing my “post-partum body” because it brings back really sweet memories of those early days, and- hello!- clearly I had just grown an entire human inside of me, of course my body is going to change!
Wrapping Everything Up
After I turned in the last of the photos, there were rounds and rounds and rounds of edits back and forth with my editor, while the design team worked on laying out the pages, and the cover design, etc.
I had spent so many hours staring at digital versions of the book and in early November I finally got to hold a real life copy in my hands! I can’t even begin to tell you how good it felt to finally have physical proof of what I had been working on for the past two years.
And that brings us to today! The Colorful Family Table will be released in just about a week and I’m so, so excited for you to finally have these recipes in your kitchen! My hope is that the cookbook will get more plants onto more family’s plates, and help the next generation have a healthier relationship with food and our planet.
This is the book I wish my mom had when I was growing up and she never knew what to make us for dinner. It’s for vegans, omnivores, flexitarian, no-label folks and just about anyone who wants to add more nutritious, delicious plants into their diet.
I hope you love the recipes as much as my family does!
Just a few days left to preorder before December 3rd, 2019 and get your bonus bundle!
Available wherever books are sold:
ps- An interview I did with my friend Talia of Party in My Plants just went live! I LOVE this chat because we went deep into how not colorful my childhood food situation was, exactly what I’m doing to help my daughters have a healthy relationship with colorful food and we chat about the new book! Click here to listen!
