Crafts and Life

Where do I get the recipes for my books?

As a writer of culinary cozy mysteries, I had to come up with previously unpublished recipes when readers started to ask for the recipes featured in my Dinner Club series. Talk about a mystery. Was I capable of departing from the wonderful recipes in the Cooking Light and Sunset magazines?

I had to remind myself original recipes do not spring forth from the very first step. An original is one most likely derived from experimenting with the basics. You’ve probably done this many times. Necessity will force you to substitute whole wheat flour for white because you don’t have enough white on hand. Or perhaps, you need a gluten-free recipe and are required to exchange the wheat flour for rice or oat. Once the basics are understood, such as which spices are better with chicken and the standard ingredients that go into baking a cake, it isn’t so hard to come up with your own variations.

For the basics, the most trusted authority when I got married was either the Betty Crocker or the Better Homes and Garden cookbooks. Those books were designed to educate beginner cooks, providing elementary instructions, explaining various cuts of meat and the difference between a simmer and a rolling boil. Those heavy tomes from years ago are collector’s items today, and I still look up the simple pie crust recipe on the back cover of Better Homes.

But the internet is the go-to source now. The information explosion has impacted the way we cook and therefore what we eat. I’ve signed up for several food blogs which inspire me to attempt Mexican street tacos or Thai coconut rice, and these kinds of international foods have added much needed variety to my cooking repertoire. Do I take those classic cookbooks off the shelf very often anymore? No. Not really. Not with the internet, where I can search for chicken with capers or salmon with dill sauce and dozens of postings will pop up on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and food blogs. There are many, I’ll even guess hundreds, of food and cooking websites. Will cookbooks go the way of encyclopedias? It’s quite possible.

So, take the fundamental recipes, be inspired by cookbooks and bloggers alike, and run with it. Add to the recipe, improve upon it, add your personality.

What I do is make notes when I try out a recipe I’ve discovered. Often it takes me longer than what it says on the instructions. I make a note of that. If I replace an ingredient, such as balsamic vinegar for apple cider, I jot that down, including how well it turned out. Common ingredient substitutions can be found on the internet, and in Betty and Better Homes, too. I recently stumbled across a blog that contained substitutions for cream soups, such as cream of chicken, cream of mushroom, and cream of celery. I signed up for that blog. How much better it is to take a time-worn recipe, swap some of those prepacked ingredients for natural alternatives, spice it up with fresh herbs, and come up with an original.

When I’ve made enough changes, my recipe is quite different from any other, it has evolved into my original. Sometimes those experiments become favorites that I prepare for my dinner club parties, and they are requested by family and friends. You can do the same thing and create wonderful original recipes that reflect your needs and tastes.

And once you do that, please share them with me! I have a board on Pinterest for dinner club recipes. See https://www.pinterest.com/whalenkarenc/dinner-club-recipes/. You can find the “Recipe Substitution for Canned Condensed Cream Soups” pin on my board. Help me out. Lend me a hand. I’ll try the recipes you post and give you a holler. Your original recipe might make it into the next book in the Dinner Club Mystery Series!

Thank you Karen Whalen for posting a guest post on my Blog, good luck with the tour and the book!