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After nearly a month the index is done. Yea! It is my least favorite part of doing a cookbook because it is boring and tedious. Compared to cleaning and filtering an industrial deep fryer indexing a cookbook is a cake walk so when I say I dislike it take it with a grain of salt.
The thing that indexing does give me is a chance to notice is how many typos and inconsistencies there are in the recipes and essays. So now I set about reading the book (again) from beginning to end. I like reading books about food so for whatever idiosyncrasy of my psyche this does not bother me like indexing. I guess part of it can be attributed to narcissism; I am often filled with pride and joy whenever I read a particularly good (at least in my mind) passage that I have written or stumble upon a forgotten recipe that has never failed to impress.
I also have some work to do on the cover art and as promised before I am going to include the concept in this post for you to admire, ridicule or both. The concept I have had for the cover is of a quasi-map of the geography of the Gulf Region layered over a photograph of a typical Third Coast sunset. A smattering of food porn helps confirm the fact that this is indeed about food. The sunset photo was taken on Portersville Bay in Coden, Alabama circa 2007. I took it while doing research for an article back in my days as the food writer for Current Magazine. The sunset was beautiful and I knew one day I'd be able to use it for something so I risked Eastern Equine Encephalitis to get it as the state bird of South Alabama is the mosquito. You can click on the thumbnail at left to get a better view of it.
Coden is a typical Gulf Coast fishing village populated with hard-working, salt-of-the-earth people whose lives revolve around the fishing industry. An industry that has been under constant assault by the federal government, toxic foreign seafood imports and mother nature. Katrina nearly leveled this area but you saw little about it on the nightly news because it did not sell advertising as well as the man-made drama in New Orleans following the storm. These people were all but ignored by the media, FEMA and all of the publicity whores who used Katrina as an excuse to get their names in the headlines. Still they persevered by pulling themselves up by their boot straps and getting to the job at hand. It is because of people like this that I have felt it important to write both this blog and the cookbook of the same name.
The thing that indexing does give me is a chance to notice is how many typos and inconsistencies there are in the recipes and essays. So now I set about reading the book (again) from beginning to end. I like reading books about food so for whatever idiosyncrasy of my psyche this does not bother me like indexing. I guess part of it can be attributed to narcissism; I am often filled with pride and joy whenever I read a particularly good (at least in my mind) passage that I have written or stumble upon a forgotten recipe that has never failed to impress.
Coden is a typical Gulf Coast fishing village populated with hard-working, salt-of-the-earth people whose lives revolve around the fishing industry. An industry that has been under constant assault by the federal government, toxic foreign seafood imports and mother nature. Katrina nearly leveled this area but you saw little about it on the nightly news because it did not sell advertising as well as the man-made drama in New Orleans following the storm. These people were all but ignored by the media, FEMA and all of the publicity whores who used Katrina as an excuse to get their names in the headlines. Still they persevered by pulling themselves up by their boot straps and getting to the job at hand. It is because of people like this that I have felt it important to write both this blog and the cookbook of the same name.
