Stirring the Pot

This is my season of book promotion, especially since the winter produce topic and the Christmas shopping season coincide. Thankfully I am still teaching, so I can’t go overboard with time spent smiling and signing and passing out samples. It’s fun in small doses.   

At the Community Farm Store in Duncan

Last week’s dose was on Vancouver Island, where my friend Gale organized events in Ladysmith and Duncan, hunted up the ingredients, turned over her kitchen to our sample making, and drove us through the snow to get to the dates. She also unearthed the batiked banner I had made for a natural foods deli we ran together in Mountain View, California, 38 eventful years ago.

Using the book and talking about it with people also means that the inevitable glitches and errors of any project come to light. Someone in Ladysmith pointed out a typo and Gale and I realized that the winter fruit bars, though variable by nature, could still use some more explicit instructions for accommodating different combinations of fresh and dried fruit. 

At The Worldly Gourmet in Ladysmith. I found the fancy stove intimidating, but the audience was great.

So I am going to start posting Corrections and Comments pages on this blog periodically, and I invite your participation. If you see a typo or an omission, or if something isn’t clear, or if you have created a variation you’d be willing to share, let me know.  The book is selling well and a second printing is not a complete pipe dream, so improvements could be included then. Meantime, I can at least make them available to blog readers. 

Next event: Wednesday, Dec. 8, 7 p.m.  at Village Books in Bellingham. Samples provided by the great young cooks and their teacher Lois Rienstra at Nooksack Valley High School's Pioneer Catering.