I wrote a cookbook.

Hey there, darling. I am taking a little break this afternoon in the kitchen. Got a lot going on. Got a cup of tea brewing. I wanted to share it with you and share... Probably one of the biggest announcements I have made on this channel. Let me show you what I have going on. Well, here I have some fresh milled rolls. The dough is just starting to rise. Here I've got some apple scrap vinegar. Started this yesterday. Pot ready because I'm about to cook some soup for dinner. I've got some friends coming over. Here are the apples that I canned yesterday. Cinnamon. Well, it's in a syrup. It doesn't have any thickener, but I can open these and put some thickener in it, cook it a little while, and then make apple pies. Speaking of apple pies, I've got a couple of those here in the oven. Ooh, fogged you up. Cooking those for my babies. I am doing a batch of apple cinnamon muffins. I'm pausing on that for a second because I can't put them in until the pies are done. And here I have... My new cookbook. So I've been thinking a lot about how to announce my book. I thought about doing like this whole reenactment scene where I showed you. the ridiculous process that I went through to actually write these recipes down because I have not typically cooked by recipe. I typically cook a lot of times by feel and taste and in developing things I've figured out what works but it was all up here. In fact my family has been asking me to write my recipes down for at least 10 years maybe even more than that and I've been like yeah I've had these really great images of how I was gonna like Design a cookbook and have it printed out on some print your own service to be able to gift to my family for Christmas and I've never done it because it was a lot of work and so now they're getting this They're gonna get copies of this It was it was a lot of work. This has been Probably the hardest thing that I can think of that I have made outside of like my children, you know, like it has been so tedious because I wanted it to be good. I wanted it to be excellent. The reason I have not done a cookbook, even a personal handwriting it out one is because it was a lot of work and I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to halfway do it. But I thought about shooting a video kind of showing the process of Measuring everything out in my hands and then mixing, writing it down and then mixing it in and tasting it and then adjusting it, measuring out my hands more, adding, changing what I wrote down, recooking that over and over. For instance, chicken and dumplings. I had never really actually written that recipe down fully until I wrote it for this and we ate chicken and dumplings like three times in one week for me. Cause we were gonna eat the food. I wasn't gonna cook the food and then also have to cook dinner. And so that was definitely part of the process. My family really endured. They really, they took it for the team to eat chicken and dumplings three times a week. Don't feel bad for them. The chicken and dumplings is very good. It was. It was just a really intense process. I thought about acting that out and letting you see the process. I thought about a few different things that I could do to like pitch it and to tell you about it but today whenever i was in the kitchen and i was just working through all these things and i knew that this launch was coming up where i'm here to tell you that the pre-order is available now for my very own cookbook and with flour handprints on me and six projects going at once i thought you know what i really want to do is i really just want to turn the camera on And I want to share this milestone with my friends because it's such a big deal to me. And I want to tell you the story as to why. So when I was a young woman, I had such a burning desire for food sustainability and for sourcing and sovereignty and to really have a hand in where my food came from. I wanted it before I even really understood what it was. It was just this thing. I think I came pre-programmed with the desire to like tend the earth. I have had this image in my mind of a red barn and a garden and chickens in the yard since I was a little child. I have wanted to be a mother, I've wanted to feed people, and I've wanted to teach people. That has just been wired in me from long before I can really remember ever making a conscious choice to be any of those things. But there was a season of my life that was really really difficult because I felt completely stuck and completely hopeless. Because I so desired this life that I had absolutely no ability to make happen of my own will and volition. And it was during that season that I was a very young mom. I had two young boys and I was living in an apartment. In Knoxville, Tennessee, I had a tiny little patio. I didn't have a square foot of grass to my name. Um, and. And I desperately wanted to grow food. I was going through the situation. I was nursing my second son after he had food allergies and that led me to needing to read food labels for the first time in my life. Mind you, I was 21 years old. That really opened my eyes to what was in the food that I'd always been eating. And that was just widely available to us. Mind you, this is 2007. So this is really before you could go to like Walmart and buy grass fed beef. This was before I knew anybody using like fresh milled flours, before wanting to locally source your food had become something popular. And I felt so stuck because I didn't have any money. I didn't have any community around it. There was no YouTube channels to go watch. There were, you know, maybe blogs were starting to pop up shortly after that. There were a handful of books about farming and homesteading and self-sufficiency, mostly kind of like off-grid stuff, very unrelatable to where I was in an apartment that I could go read. And I read all of them. I got a hold of all of them. Couldn't afford to buy them. I had to rent them for the library or go, you know, sit in a bookstore and read them. I wanted it so bad though. And the lifeline came for me when a friend of mine invited me to go forage wild blackberries with her on her father-in-law's property. And. And in getting those blackberries by the gallon, it was the first time I'd had bulk anything that I could like learn to process. I learned to can and I learned to freeze them. And throughout that time, I started to learn to cook because it made sense to me that if If one day, you know, God willing, my dream came true and I was able to grow food. It was going to come in ingredients. It wasn't going to come the way that I had been used to cooking with microwave instructions or, you know, cans that I could open and dump all together. It was going to be something that I had to learn to manage. And so that was my entry point. It was the kitchen. So I got like my rusty cast iron pan out of the cabinet and learned to season it. And I learned to cook. bread from scratch and biscuits from scratch. I learned, gosh, I learned how to make yogurt. I started making smoothies daily and I started to roast whole chickens instead of only ever buying skinless, boneless breasts. And it was a process, but I learned to cook. And during that time, um, I didn't have a lot of people to teach me. As I mentioned, there weren't quite as many resources available back then as there are now. But what I could do was go to the library and get books. And so what I did was I would get cookbooks and I would go cook through the recipes. And it was in the pages of cookbooks that I stopped feeling so helpless about my dream. And I really... begun to appreciate that if you have a dream, becoming equipped for it is truly the best thing you can do no matter what. Whether that dream is obtainable or if it's just completely impossible. Becoming equipped for it is really the best thing you can do. This is where the phrase really came true for me. Turn your waiting room into a classroom. If there's something that you're hoping to accomplish, if there's something that you're really, really dreaming of and harboring in your heart, whether you can make it happen or not, the best thing you can do in the meantime is prepare yourself to be in that fulfillment. So I got good in the kitchen and I learned In doing so, what an incredible gift it was to be able to cook good food for your family. I learned what an incredible power it was whenever you're on a limited budget to be able to not need convenience because so much of what we pay for in the grocery store is convenience. And as the dream started to come true and as there were chickens in the yard and the garden and the Big Red Barn, I'm so emotional, guys. Hang with me. This is a big deal. This is a really big deal to me and when we built the big red barn and we filled it with dairy cows and we had dairy goats and I found myself with a pantry overflowing and a freezer full and a garden that was abundant. I had the skills to know exactly what to do with it that I wasn't wasting That I wasn't scrambling. I was just prepared. Because I had gotten in the kitchen. And so I waited to make this book because it meant that much to me. to me. To me, making this and the whole time I wrote it, I was thinking of that 21-year-old girl. I was just thinking, what would I hand her? Like if I could face her today, like what would I say? Hey here, you're really going to want to know how to make these chicken and dumplings. So that's what I did. I waited for the right publisher. I was approached by DK. And when they came to me, they're under Penguin Random House, and when they came and asked if I would be interested in writing a cookbook, I knew that they were going to have the resources and the ability to make this truly excellent. So they have been amazing. Part of publishing with a big publisher like this is, you know, like... There are recipe testers hired and incredible photographers, though a lot of the photos in this book I took, but we also were able to hire an incredible team to photograph the food and make it really shine. When the photos started coming back in and I started getting them, of course I'm like super emotional and I looked at Jeremiah and I was like, this looks like my food wearing fancy clothes. It was just... Thrilling and exciting. I have poured my heart into this. I have poured my heart into the captions and to really deliberating what recipes I wanted to share. My goal in writing this was to give people a resource. My hope is that if you so choose to obtain a copy of this cookbook, it's called Rooted in the Kitchen. I haven't said that to this point. Probably should have I should have said it before then. My hope is that within a year it's just tattered, you know. I hope you will just completely destroy this thing. I hope you will write notes in it. I hope that you wear it out, stain it up, and I hope that someday the recipes in this are the things that your children and your neighbors and your friends remember you making for them. I really, I really do hope that I am handing You something with this that adds as much value to you as the lessons that I received when I was in the place of really needing a lifeline. to the life that I really wanted to live. It is available for pre-order now. It is going to it's going to be launched in April. I'm going to tell you this is a dummy book. There's nothing inside of here. The book is not gone fully to the printer yet. This is for the launch and also for us to like approve the cover and everything. Trust me, if there were pages in here that I have within my power to show you, I would totally show you. There's no way that I could possibly hold that back from you. This is just for the sake of launching, but this is the actual book. This is the size of it, the weight of it, the beauty, the beauty of it. Isn't it gorgeous? It's amazing. I'm just smitten. Oh, Helen made her way on the back cover. The photos are beautiful. Uh, the recipes are tried and true, um, I covered staples, uh, like swaps that you can start making from home, and then I just did the whole day from breakfast, lunch, dinner, sides, desserts, did a little cocktail section, um, yes, basil tea is in there, as well as some of the other Roots & Refuge favorites that you have definitely heard about. Ad nauseum if you've been around here for very long. This is the flavor of my home. This is truly like what I feed my family and it is my incredible joy to get to make it available to you. Exactly how I dreamed that it would be. I think that people started asking me for a cookbook the first summer that my YouTube channel took off. What was that? 2018. And I wasn't hasty to make this because I wanted to do justice exactly what it meant to me. And I feel so confident as we have gotten to the end stages of edits and getting ready to send it off to print. That, uh, it is, it is everything that I hoped that it would be. I mean, truly it has surpassed my imaginations and all I can feel whenever I look at it now is like, whoa, um, I didn't even dream of being the person on the other side of this. Not really. Like I, I hoped to get good at it. You know, that was my dream. My dream was to be able to grow the food. My dream was to be able to. Like live the life that I was envisioning, but to be able to empower other people to do the same is just so infinitely more than I even, even imagined. So yeah, it'll be out April 6. If you pre order it now, I would so greatly appreciate it. The way pre orders work whenever books like this are made is that sends the message to the retailers. There's, uh... Just how liked it's going to be and getting lots of pre-orders is how it's how my first book ended up being sold in Costco stores was because you guys pre-ordered so many of them. It helps tremendously. So if this sounds like something that would benefit you, please consider the pre-order. I'll put the link down below. Look at that. That'll advertise a cookbook right there. We made pretty pies, but I think those are pretty good looking, don't you? They taste amazing. You can make very good tasting pies, but they're not necessarily the most beautiful. I just call them rustic, and then people think it's on purpose. Thank you guys for everything. Rooted in the Kitchen, simple seasonal recipes from the ground up by Jessica Sowers. That's me. I bless you. Until next time.