How our PLWP cookbook came to be,
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How we started out with four people and finished with nine.
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The idea for the PLWP cookbook came from Nan Abraham last spring when the PLWP team leaders met for the first time. I volunteered to put a team together and start working on it. The next step was choosing team members. Three names came to mind, Ryan Tripp, Chosh, and Patti Hager. I invited them each to join the team and they accepted. We then put the word out through the MGH forum and the PLWP website that we were open for business and began gathering the recipes. The recipes started coming in trickles, and soon became a flood. We had recipes out the ...… uh .. we had plenty of recipes. |
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It was decided that we would meet in person with our collected recipes and begin sorting through them. The first meeting was at team member Chris Hall's home in Canada. We commandeered her house for a week, spreading our collection of recipes over the dining room table and across the floor. The four of us decided on the chapter titles and started separating the recipes into categories. By the end of our visit we had them sorted out and had decided who would take which chapters to be typed and checked.
Our team members were also volunteering for other projects and were getting overloaded. I decided to put off work on the cookbook while the first PLWP golf outing was being planned. Patti Hager’s golf outing was demanding her full attention and Chris Hall also had things piling up. I thought we needed volunteers to get the stacks of recipes typed. I contacted Nancy Mullen and Sandy Norris asking for their help. We now had six members on our team.
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The next difficulty was trying to work on the cookbook while all the other events were being planned, but the book slowly grew and developed a personality of its own. I took advantage of some team leaders who were here for a meeting and asked them to dress up to be photographed for illustrations. They complied and the happy result adorns the cover of our book. Our cookbook was developing quite well and now had a name, ‘What’s Shakin in the Kitchen?’. |
It soon became evident that more illustrations were needed. Anyone visiting me was costumed and posed for cookbook pictures. I asked Peg Willocks for some of her drawings and they proved to be perfect for our book. We now had seven members on our team.
At this point we were all getting bogged down and made slow progress. We needed help formatting the pages and my husband Carl volunteered. So our eighth member had joined the ranks. I was creating more illustrations during this time and putting them in a cookbook file we set up so they could be pulled out and used as fillers.
Now we come to our ninth team member, Ron Hager. Ron is the one who has been guiding us with his knowledge of the printing industry. He's also the one who put the completed cookbook files together in a 'proof' that so we could check it over.
Every member of this team has added value to the finished product and a bit of themselves to give it the uniqueness it has, but it's your recipes that make our cookbook special, and they do look good!
Manga!
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